First five

Here are the first five lighthouse rubber stamp designs in what will become octoberpumpkin's annual series in this topic. What you see are the original designs, not stamped images.

By midweek these along with three additional lighthouse images will be shipped away to our manufacturer to make into first-quality cushioned rubber stamps ready for market.

The copyright info will not be incorporated into the stamps themselves, but appears only on the photo illustration here.

The remaining three images will be posted here before the end of this week. Sometime during the next few weeks I will post some cardmaking and other projects using the lighthouse designs.

The lighthouses shown, left to right, represent Cape Hatteras Light NC, Brant Point Light MA, Marblehead Light OH, Yaquina Head Light OR, and Annisquam Harbor light MA.

It was fun for me to study dozens upon dozens of lighthouses and choose the ones I wanted to present first! I hope you like my choices. Feel free to suggest yours in time for our next year's set! Who knows - your fave lighthouse might be among the ones selected to immortalise on rubber stamps!

The lighthouses will be available in sets and singles, available from octoberpumpkin.etsy.com (see link to the right) in 6 or 7 weeks.

Thanks for coming to our preview!

Big big news!

Okay, the news some of you have been waiting for and asking about. . .the new lighthouse stamp designs are almost done. There will be 8 lighthouses total. I am going to post several of them on my blog within the next few days, so be on the lookout! I'm very excited about this, and I believe you will like the designs too. They have to go to the manufacturer to be translated into actual rubber stamps, which takes approximately a month, and it is another couple of weeks more until they are ready for shipping out. But the biggest part is behind us and they will be ready before you know it! Tune in in the next few days for the design preview!

Logjam

I haven't been on here for several days because with the start of summer everything at our house seemed to pile up like a mess of logs going downriver. But overall, a happy mess.

Besides the annual picnics, festivals, yardwork, extra socialising, Father's Day, & all that normally takes place in early summer, our family is gearing up for a big bash celebrating my father's 90th birthday, with relatives coming from far and away.
He and his wife are also moving to a retirement village some 20 miles away in a few weeks, so that's another thing, and we have a total of 7 or 8 other b.day celebrations featuring friends or family coming up in the next few weeks.

I love birthdays but I hate that, "Now what would be the perfect gift for this dearly beloved individual?" feeling, don't you? I end up overshopping, never finding that one ideal item I wish would express all the positive thoughts and feelings I have for the giftee, and end up buying a gift card at the last sec. If Mother had thought ahead she might have named me Good Intentions.

I have had a medical crisis of sorts as well, which I am trying to decide how to handle. In March a case of flu went into pneumonia and uncontrolled asthma, sending me to the ER one scary crack of dawn. The doc there said since I was over 50 & couldn't breathe, it was hospital protocol to require a CT scan to check for pulmonary emboli. Ok, did that. There were no clots but a couple wks. later my asthma doc's nurse called and said a "pulmonary nodule" (???) had been seen on the scan so I needed a followup. Having never heard of that I immediately went into a spasm of terror. But, she said, it was most likely "nothing", or scarring from the pneumonia. People walk around with all kinds of stuff inside them that they never know about until it is incidentally discovered by a test for something else.

I am the world's foremost living medical chicken and scared to death of even having my blood pessure taken (it hurts! oh yes it does!) But I also don't want to die of the Dread Malignant Exploding Pulmonary Nodules, so I agreed to the followup scan which I had last week.

Yesterday the results of that followup showed that the item in question was behaving itself and not growing or assuming odd postures or anything else suspect. But now get this! They want me to have another followup scan in October. How weird can this get?

It seems like I don't have anything wrong, but just in case I might have, even though the odds are way against it, I am supposed to keep getting a test that exposes my poor innocent lung tissue to higher and higher levels of carcinogenic radiation whilst at the same time flooding my vascular network with dye that is known to destroy human kidneys. How does this make sense?

All you papercrafting radiologists and specialists out there who read my blog (big LOL) (in fact, big HHH for har, har, har) should think this over and come up with an answer. I'll be a-waitin'!

Hidden photo

There are several photos below, but the entire series is not immediately visible at this time because a photo which is part of the series is stashed under "older posts". The space alloted for immediate view of posts was apparently used up and did not allow for inclusion of the earlier or first photo at the bottom of the series. To see it, just click on older posts or click on the first post in line under the visible series of pictures. (As more posts are added, the configuration is going to change due to space, so none of this will apply after that. In fact it will probably change with this particular post, and you will need to click on older posts to see the last few photos!)

The candy swap items shown in this series are all made of acid-free materials except for parts of the items shown in the "missing" first photo in that series. I'm talking about the photo with the lobster, pig, and toast. (If that combo doesn't compel you to check it out, I don't know what would!)

The theme in that photo was Cooking. I made motifs related to food, which is certainly used in cooking (at least we would hope so, but when you read the list of ingredients on some products you have to wonder!) It seemed like it would be a fun idea to use retro illustrations for these motifs, so I dug out some old magazines and pamphlets which featured foody or cooking graphics from olden times. They have not been duplicated or sold, just cut out and looked at, so no copyright problem.

Some would question the permanence of the papers the illustrations are printed on, but if you want to try the idea and have concern for this just spray the items with archival spray available at any craft and hobby store.

Another thought is, while the items I cut out are not necessarily archival, they are mounted on acid-free archival Stampin' Up cardstock which would be the surface in contact with a project. Therefore if the cut-outs faded or yellowed it would not spread to or stain the project itself with the SU cardstock providing a safe buffer. Actually I thought yellowing, if it occured, would yield a desirable antiqued effect.

By the way, I drew the faces on the toast slices. . .it seemed to give the motif a nice cheerfully-goofy 50s look.

Not only did my computer upload 321 photos, only 6 of which it had been directed to do, and not only did my flash fail when I took the pix, but then I learned they all uploaded to an alien photo storage locale (that I had never even heard of and didn't know lurked inside my computer) instead of going to My Pictures as per usual. When I tried to retrieve them, either they failed to transmit at all or whole batches went together even though they weren't remotely connected by date, topic, or relevance.

At last, though I don't know how it happened, I managed to get the 6 pix I wanted to share with you all swept over to My Pictures, and from there I hoped eventually to reach this destination. But by the time I sweat blood over all the other procedures and misattempts, the left side of my brain had gone into freeze mode and I couldn't remember how to cluster pix to travel together with a text post. Perhaps I never knew. . .sigh!

Now it's time to make a cup of coffee and do something wonderfully simple and dependable - read a good book! Yeah!!! Isn't it a huge relief to know there's still something in life that doesn't have to be turned on, programmed, troubleshot, aimed at, or adjusted for sound? All you need are eyes. . .and a cup of tea or coffee makes it even more fun. See you next time. I'm outa here!

If anything can go wrong it will

Hi Everybody,

The technogremlins are hard at work in our house today. Two phone conversations were disconnected, a bathroom light failed to work when turned on, and the camera flash isn't in sync with the shoot button. Then when I tried to harvest the pictures taken today, in spite of being set on "New Images", the computer slurped out dupes of 321 other pix in the cam. What next, I ask you?

However. . .I said I would share a few pix related to the project described in my post below from several days past, and so I will. They are poor quality photos but will give you some idea of what I've been doing this past week. I have been doing it pretty frantically since I volunteered for way too many categories and ended up needing to create 80 little pieces of "candy" to swap. All scrapbookers, cardmakers, and other papercrafters out there will recognise the phenom known as "candy" - fun little handcrafted motifs that can be used as-is in coordinating theme projects.

So take a look. It might be fun to see! All the beach and all the Halloween motif stamps are from october pumpkin (see sidebar for co. online location, plus check out Addicted to Rubber Stamping.

Ooops, the technogremlins are not done with me this day! The add image thingie isn't working now. I'll post this and work on a separate photo transmission. Stay tuned.

New pix coming soon!

It's been awhile since I've posted because about half a dozen major projects have surfaced in my home and work life, and I've been working on those. So far everything's on track and with any luck life should be back to normal around mid-July!

I visited a website called splitcoaststampers.com and just had to join. It's a gathering of likeminded papercrafters. I investigated a forum and quickly found out they have "candy swaps," but we're not talking fudge and peppermints. Paper concoctions with various themes are the sugar-free sweets here.

People who join the swap are to decide on a theme, then come up with 4 pieces of "candy" for 4 others in that topical group. Since I'm already overbusy these couple of months, it seemed silly to jump into another project with both feet, but I do have some things lying around that could be used for my contributed paper treats, so I settled on five (yes, five!) themes: beach, Halloween, Christmas, snowmen, and cooking. (Cooking? What was I thinking?) Today I got the Halloween stuff together and will post photos of it for you to see sometime in the next few days.

First I have to reinstall my camera. For unknown reasons it has come uninstalled.
Anyway, keep watching and I'll get the pictures on one way or another.

If anyone is interested in what else is going on at our house, I'm trying to do some belated spring cleaning, my father is going to turn 90 in July so I'm working on a big party - as is his wife, who happens to also be my husband's aunt (both she and my father were widowed, so we introduced them to one another and the next thing you know they got married.) Am also involved in october pumpkin, the rubber stamp biz my daughter runs and I design for - and my father and his wife just sold their home to move to a retirement village, so he gave me dozens of family photo albums plus big boxes of photos and all kinds of documents re our family pedigree; I've been having fun going through this stuff, but not having fun trying to find a place to put all of it. Hubby and I have lived in the same house for 43 years so we have long since filled up every square inch of storage space!

See you soon!