Thesaurus Thursday | 100DayProject Day 26

100DayProject Day 26

I still don’t have a finished card 17 to report. But I did have a great lunch and crafternoon with Ivana, Vicki and Josee. We did fit in a bit more experimenting with foiling, stamping with metallic inks and embossing. Definitely more things learned and more things that I’d like to try.

Cardstock seems to make a difference. I think the one that I used was too light.Or I left the transfer gel on too long or put on too much of it. I was trying to make cover a full cardfront so that I could use the ‘negative’ of a foil that I already ran through my foiling machine, but the paper was a soggy mess when I lifted it to pull off. I also think I made a mistake in trying to roll the gel on right on the paper. In my next attempt I rolled the gel onto the brayer then rolled it onto the paper.
Here I am trying to roll the gel out first onto the brayer before rolling it onto the paper – it seemed to work better.
But it did take a while to get the texture that you see on the brayer (which also transferred to the paper at first) smoothed out on the cardstock. I forgot to take a picture of the texture showing in the early stages of braying on the cardstock and of the relatively smooth final surface on the cardstock. There was definitely not any ridges like I had from the palette knife yesterday.
I tried to put some on a pre-ink blended piece of cardstock through a stencil using a palette knife. I think the thickness of the stencil makes a difference, as does the tool with which you’re applying the transfer gel. As you can see I had troubles getting it totally smooth using a palette knife. I don’t yet have a scraper which Vicki had seen used in some videos but we did try with the edge of a piece of cardstock but it wasn’t that effective. I wonder if using a sponge brayer might yield better results – smoother and less thick. It’s going to be interesting to see how this turns out when I run it through the heat foil machine. Maybe I’ll cut this paper and half and try half of it using pressure to try to transfer the foil and the other half with the heat transfer technique.
In this example I tried to use a brayer to remove some of the thickness of the gel after I had applied it with a palette knife. There seems to be quite a lot of texture to the gel; it’s not nearly as thick as when I didn’t try to remove some of it with the brayer, but there still seems to be quite a bit of thickness in spots. This is a full 8.5 x 11 paper so I’ll cut it into 4 pieces to try a few different ways

Vicki also delivered some 2023 Spellbinders Advent Calendars that she was able to get on sale; instead of just me and Shelli working our way through the 24 doors of products, 5 of us (Vicki, Ivana, Shelli, Nancy and I) will gradually work our way through. The plan is to open 1 door each week starting in June after I finish my 100DayProject. I’m not sure if I’ll continue with my blog posts after that project but if I do you’ll see some more cards using Spellbinders products.

Thesaurus Thursday

This morning as I stepped out of the house, I was greeted by a symphony of bird song. So many different ones singing at the same time and it sounded lovely. I wondered if there might the a word that I could use as my theme for today. The closest I came was troupe, it’s not a ‘th’ sound at the beginning so doesn’t go quite as well as I like for my theme for today. But I did use the thesaurus to find a word similar to symphony. As I am trying to write more, I find myself using my phone to look up words, so thesaurus seems like a very good theme for today.

I similarly wondered if there might be another word for the V formation that the Canada Geese utilize when they are flying. So I looked it up. Apparently it is referred to as a skein. I don’t quite understand how it looks like a skein of yarn. But it was interesting to know that that V formation is not just about the shape of the V but also about the timing of the flapping. When you take some time to observe them flying it really is quite an orchestration of the flapping and flow of their flight paths. Beautiful and amazing really. As I struggled a bit to pass someone in my swim lane this morning, I realized that it is amazing how they keep up their formation for such long periods of time. Apparently they use their honking to maintain flock cohesion, coordinate shifting of positions and encourage each others during long flights. It’s also interesting to learn that a group of geese isn’t called a gaggle when they are flying but rather a skein, a team, a flock or a wedge and when they are flying close together they’re referred to as a plump. It seems high time that I’ve learned a bit more about Canadian Geese. So glad they were part of the symphony that greeted me as I set out for my walk this morning.

Don’t forget that it’s also a Thankful Thursday and a Thinking of You Thursday so you can always take a few minutes (at 3:00?) to jot down a few things for which you’re thankful, or send a thank you card or send a thinking of you message to someone. Happy Mail and messages are always nice surprises for the recipient.

Throwback Thursday:

I have 2 sorts of Throwback Thursdays today. First a copy of my blog post from 20 March 2010 (15 years ago – yikes) and then some photos that Roland has been scanning in from old negatives.

2010 03 20 – Provincials: Day 3

Saturday: Lots of uncertainty about whether our 2-2 record so far combined with our upcoming 2 games today would lead us to mini-game tie-breakers for the final spot in the semi-finals tomorrow. Things become more clear after our 2-6 loss in our 9:00 game against Burlington. We’d need to win our 6th game plus two other teams would need to lose their 6th games for us to advance. Luckily (?) we opted to check out between games since we ended up losing 3-6 to Forest in our 2:00 game. It was a well-played game, but things just weren’t going that well for us. Turns out those 2 other teams won their games, so even a 3-3 rather than 4-2 record wouldn’t have had us advancing. We had a quick stop at the McEwan’s gas station about 15 minutes out of North Bay to fill up on gas and stock up on junk food; unfortunately the ice cream cone that I’d been looking forward to all weekend wasn’t to be: turns out the store only has ice cream cones in the summer (which we always get on our way to Castle Oma (Roland’s parents’ cottage on the Pickerel River)). The drive home was uneventful; we got home about 7:00. Roland and the children watched some hockey and other sports on TV while I caught up on my blog. While it’s too bad the girls didn’t advance, we were thrilled with their 2 (unexpected) wins (pretty good for team ranked 9th among the 10 teams). And, now that we’re home, it will be great to have a full day here tomorrow before heading back to school and work. Sadly, except for a year-end party (and hopefully having the girls over to scrapbook), that’s it for ringette for this year. Heidi’s lucky, her ringette season was a month longer than Stefan’s hockey season which ended on February 19th, the night before we left for Mexico. Now we’re all looking forward to spring and summer – soccer, paddling, cottaging and that ice cream cone on our way to Castle Oma!

Some things are the same and some are different since 2010: Heidi is still playing ringette. She plays in the National Ringette League now so her team will be going to Nationals (rather than Provincials) the first week of April which will be held here in Ottawa this year. Her team isn’t ranked particularly high this year either so (not to jinx them) I don’t expect they’ll be advancing to the finals in the year end tournament this year either. Stef isn’t playing much hockey anymore; just a few fundraiser games on a TD team against some other financial instituation teams. We still look forward to icecream on our way to and from the Pickerel River just at a different ice cream store. I still refer to Roland’s parents’ cottage as Castle Oma. I haven’t been doing much scrapbooking for years because I’ve been focused on cardmaking, but I do hope to get back into it. There are so many other ways to keep memories these days such as our social media feeds and blogs. That was our one and only trip to Mexico, definitely no family traditions of trips south.

And now for a few of the photos from the negatives that Roland’s been scanning:

Camping with cousins Peter and Blair likely at Bon Echo.
Roland’s dad was a great photographer. This is Roland and his mom.
And Roland with his dad.
And Roland on the ice. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen one of those mouth guards!

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