The Kingdom

I finally got around to watching this last night -- I've had it from Netflix most of the summer.

The movie is a fictional account of a terrorist bombing in Saudi Arabia. The victims of the attack are western oil workers and their families, relaxing in their highly-secured compound at a Sunday softball game. A special agent for the FBI is on site, and is killed after the first wave of attacks by a huge car bomb that destroys an apartment building(a la the Kobar Towers blast in the early 1990's).

An elite team of FBI agents -- Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman and Chris Cooper -- finagle their way into the country to investigate the deaths of the Americans. They join forces with a reluctant Saudi police chief, who grows to appreciate the American's dedication and expertise.

As the movie ends, and loose ends are tied up, we are reminded that the terror will continue so long as revenge figures into motivation for violence. The movie was very engaging, and I found myself several times with muscles clenched, ready for the next bomb. Yeah, it's very violent.

Wine Country Watercolor

I've been watercoloring images lately, following a summer of Copics. For this card, I used the traditional Adirondack ink pads, the colors which are slightly greyed. This is probably my favorite pallette.

Image is by Stampendous; sentiment is Hero Arts.

I'd enjoy a class of wine right now, if it weren't only 1:30 p.m. ;O

Autumnal Tag

Despite the fact that it was 103F here today, my tag for the weekly "Tag, You're It" challenge is all about autumn. I also had to cheat -- the challenge was to use punches, but I used my die cutter instead. I got a chance to use my leaf dies to make this tag:



I got to use my favorite fall sentiment, the Emily Bronte quote: "Every leaf speaks bliss to me, falling from the silent tree." I am not a good enough photographer to make that show clearly. But I hope you will note that I've created a foam core white board "studio" for my shoots! Ha Ha.

Poppy Prototype

I wanted to use my Flourishes poppy stamps. Each flower, bud and leaf is an individual stamp, allowing you to build your own bouquet. This can be a challenge.
The card started life as a 5 x 5 square, and I cut it down after stamping and masking to about 3.5 x 5. The size of the card is about 5 x 7.

Tropic Thunder

Crude. Obscene. Profane. Offensive. And very, very funny.

That is all.

P.S. I am so glad Robert Downey Jr. found his way back into acting. He is tremendous in his role as an over-invested method actor. He's also got beautiful blue eyes.

P.S.S. This is the first movie I've paid to see Tom Cruise in a very long time. He is very good as Les Grossman(perfect name), an over-the-top Hollywood producer in search of big box office $$.

Christmas Tag

I made this tag for the challenge on the "Tag, You're It" blog. I found this blog on a mention from another blogger.

This week's challenge was to make a tag for Christmas. I used one of my favorite angel stamps to make this tag:



The stamp is from Stampington. I watercolored her with Adirondack ink, and a touch of Twinkling H20s. All the papers are Club Scrap. I ran the cream piece through a Cuttlebug embossing folder, and then sprayed it with gold Radiant Rain. You can't really see the glitz on the photo.

In my first iteration, I used a Distress ink pad in Antique Linen on the embossed piece. In real life, there is a little too much contrast, and the background fights with the angel in the foreground. This angel has more Twinking H2O paint, her wings are an attempt at a copper patina:



This was a fun challenge. You can find the challenge site at http://weekendtaggers.blogspot.com/

Good Read

I finished "When Montana and I Were Young" by Margaret "Peggy" Bell last night. I hadn't intended to read the entire book in one sitting. I intended to watch the Olympics; a water polo match was on, so I thought I'd read until that was over. Wrong. I couldn't put this book down!

This is a memoir of the author's first 18 years, from her birth in Great Falls, MT in 1888 until 1906. She suffered terrible abuse from a step-father, and the step-father's brother, but she doesn't dwell on it. Peggy is no victim. She details her life, including her memories of meeting Charles M. Russell, Montana's cowboy artist, and her near-entry into the novitiate of the Sisters of Providence (I think) in Washington. She offers fascinating and vivid descriptions of the prairie and livestock she loved, and the daily rigors of life without running water, electricity, and central heating.

Chocolate Chips

Got this dollar stamp of the little rodent -- hamster? gerbil? prairie dog? -- who loves chocolate chip cookies. I popped him up from the card with some foam tape. Made the giant cookie with my Nestablilities die, and hand-cut the chips.

Inside, the sentiment says "Friends are the chocolate chips in the cookies of life."

"When I'm old . . .

I don't want them to say of me, 'She's so charming,' I want them to say, 'Be careful, I think she's armed.'" —G. Stoddart

Travel ATCs

I made these a while ago for a swap. I ran across them again, so decided to post a couple. As I recall, this was actually an alphabit swap, and I had to use the letters C,E,S,X and A. Here are C and E:



I color-copied some maps from an old grade-school geometry book for the background, then used the silhouette stamps from ????. The letters are QuiKutz.

Iron Man

I finally saw "Iron Man" on Sunday, in an attempt to spend some time in air conditioning. Har. The theater was warm, but the movie was surprisingly entertaining.

The movie tells the beginning of the Marvel Comics superhero "Iron Man." The man is Tony Stark, played here by Robert Downey, Jr., a billionaire playboy who runs Stark Industries. Stark produces the latest in technical armaments for war. Tony's inheirited the company from his father, a developer of the atomic bomb, and is mentored by Obediah Stane, played by Jeff Bridges.

While on a look-see in the Middle East, presumably Iraq, Tony's humvee caravan is attacked, and Tony is kidnapped by what we suppose to be terrorists. Tony is severely injured in the attack with a shrapnel bomb -- produced by Stark Industries. He is saved by a doctor, also a captive, who inserts an electo-magnet into Tony's chest cavity to prevent the fragments from piercing his heart.

The terrorists want Tony to build them the newest Stark missle, dubbed the "Jericho." Tony and the doctor spend many days dimantling old equipment, welding, etc. and produce not a bomb, but Iron Man's exoskeleton.

As you might guess, Tony escapes the clutches of the evil doers, and returns to LA a changed man. He wants Stark Industries to stop making weapons, a move not endorsed by an increasingly menacing Stane or the stockmarket.

Mamma Mia!

I've been trying to post all week, and haven't been able to get in. I can't leave comments on websites, either.

I saw "Mamma Mia!" on Wednesday afternoon, with a theater full of other women. Most reviewers panned this movie, but at least Roger Ebert was honest about it: he admitted the movie wasn't made for him, but for women and girls. And it is a woman's movie. I enjoyed the movie, and so did my audience-mates.

The plot is paper-thin. Donna, an aging hippie, runs a hotel on a Greek Island. She's raised her daughter, Sophie, as a single mother, and is in the midst of preparations for Sophie's wedding. Unbeknownst to Donna, Sophie invites three men who might be her father. You can tell almost from the first instance who Sophie's dad is. But, much singing and dancing will have to occur before the happy ending, and a couple of mysteries will be revealed.

The music is very catchy, even if you weren't a particular ABBA fan in the day. I bought a pricy Diet Coke at the snack bar as I entered the theater, and the 16 or 17-year old girl who waited on me let me know she LOVED the movie, and she'd sung along with it when she saw it at the drive-in. She bought the soundtrack, and knew all the lyrics by heart. She was very cute.

Y.ou K.now Y.ou R.ock Challenge

Well, here goes. My stamping friend, Julie Koerber, has a new challenge blog. I am determined to participate, since closure of our local stamp store means no more fun classes. I hesitate only because I've seen the challenge entries already posted, and there is SERIOUS talent in these challenges.

The challenge was to create a card using an "album" cover as the jumping-off point. Being old, I chose an old disc, the Brian Setzer Orchestra's "Dirty Boogie":


After several tries, I came up with this:


I sprayed Radiant Rain (Irish Mist, Sky Blue) on 140-lb hot press watercolor paper, and wiped with a papertowel. I have not perfected the blob-less application of these beautiful glittery sprays, so wiping after applying eliminates those glitches.

The stamps are all Impression Obsession. I went with the drink theme, although I used coffee in this iteration. On the album, the smoke from a cigarette is highlighted with white; I highlighted the steam from the coffee cups with a white gel pen. It's only slightly visible. I topped the card with a Martha Stewart border punch, to add some angularity, and balanced that with the stick-on pearls, which also adds a little more white.

Dog Days

July is traditionally the month during which the "dog days of summer" begin. According to Wikipedia,

[t]he Dog Days originally were the days when Sirius, the Dog Star, rose just before or at the same time as sunrise (heliacal rising), which is no longer true owing to precession of the equinoxes. The ancients sacrificed a brown dog at the beginning of the Dog Days to appease the rage of Sirius, believing that that star was the cause of the hot, sultry weather.

I am celebrating the dog days by making doggie cards. These will mostly go to a friend, who kindly requests a bundle of cards as a birthday gift. The first card features a dollar stamp set I got at Joanne's:

The same little chihuahua, using a Martha Stewart border punch as a mask:

Finally, a Hero Arts stamp set:

Hancock

Summer wouldn't be complete without a Will Smith movie, and Hancock is this year's offering.

Smith is an angry, hungover superhero with a bad attitude and a penchant for saving humanity with maximum destruction of property. As an example, in the opening sequence he helps the LAPD apprehend a careening Suburban filled with machine-gun toting bad guys. When Hancock arrives at full-speed, he breaks through the freeway signs, which land on a number of police cruisers and destroy them. He eventually lifts the Suburban, and, flying over downtown LA, crashes into several buildings with the vehicle before he impales it on the tower over the Capitol Records building.

Into this public relations nightmare steps Ray, played by Jason Bateman. He has a plan to revamp Hancock's public image. Ray is the movie's moral center, an ad-man with a heart for the world. He's been trying, unsuccessfully, to get a big pharmaceutical company to donate a tuberculosis drug, in exchange for use of an "all Heart" logo. Not surprisingly, big business is reluctant to bite.

A fun movie. Will Smith is always entertaining, and he sees to quite enjoy the havoc he creates as Hancock.

No more Zoo

Click on the photo to make it marginally bigger.

A layout I did earlier this year; I'm posting it today so I can get in the habit of posting everyday, or nearly so!

All papers are from Club Scrap.

WALL*E

Wednesday was my half day, so I saw "Wall*E" the new Disney-Pixar animated movie. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Wall*E lives on Earth, quite alone except for his cockroach pal. He goes to work as a trash compactor; he is cleaning up an abandonned and despoiled Manhattan, by all appearances. All human life has fled the planet, ruined by the megaconglomerate "BNL" or "Big and Large."

His routine is set aside one day by the arrival of EVE, a drone sent by the orbiting humans to check to see if life has returned to the planet. Wall*E falls in "love" with EVE, and presents her with a green plant he's rescued from an abandonned refrigerator, and has growing in an old shoe. EVE's sensors respond to the plant, and she is drawn back to the orbiting ship, Wall*E tagging along.

The humans have all become very round, nearly boneless creatures whose only work consists of sitting in motorized chairs and drinking all their food in big slurpies, their every need attended to by numerous robots. The Captain is likewise round and attended to by the menacing "Auto-Pilot," whose presence nearly prevents the Captain from responding to the positive indicator of a rejuvenated Earth.

A good movie, many out-right belly laughs.

Back from the Netherlands

Earlier this month I was in Rotterdam for a Zonta International convention. 2,000 women from 67 countries participating in a 4-day meeting to elect new international officers and board members, and vote on a series of by-law changes -- which turned out to be surprisingly contentious.

While the meetings were interesting, my travel companion and I were most interested in seeing something of the country. Big cities like Rotterdam are mostly the same. Rotterdam's appeal comes in its very modern architecture; it was flattened by bombs in WWII and had to rebuild most of the center city. The Erasmus Bridge, aka "The White Swan" is a particularly striking example.



We took the water bus up the river for an hour to Dordrect, the oldest official city in Holland, chartered in 1220. We wandered the streets of the old city, took many photos, and ate lunch in a cafe along a canal.



We climbed the clock tower of the Grote Kerk, up 247 steps to the top crow's nest for a stunning view of the city and the surrounding country. We could see Rotterdam in the distance.






After our short time in Dordrecht, we traveled by waterbus to Kinderdijk, to see the windmills, as pictured above. A system of 19 windmills drains the Kinderdijk polder; the mills were built in the mid-1700's, and most continue to serve as houses.

We toured the inside of a mill; very tight quarters indeed. As we exited, we saw a family dressed in what appeared to be regional costume, complete with wooden shoes, appropriately called klompen by the Dutch. Of course I bought a pair!



The windmills of Kinderdijk are one of the best known Dutch tourist sites. They were placed on the list of UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites in 1997.

Brrr!

Making some cards to give away, and dug out an old Stampin' Up set. It's a favorite, and I've done it in purple and green before. But this time, I used my Big Shot and a Cuttlebug embossing folder of snowflakes to add a little something. It came together well, although the color on the scan is not true to life.

The Journey is the Reward

Just a couple of cards finished tonight. I like the kimono stamp, but haven't used it before tonight. I'll make some similar cards using different color schemes, since I'll probably be giving this card away in a card set.

The background of this card is Hero Arts, as is the kimono, from the clear set "K." The sentiment is Amuse Art Stamps. It's hard to distinguish the Chinese characters in the background; I'm blaming my scanner. It is supposed to be a watermark-type background, but is stamped with Distress Ink in Fired Brick.

The second card uses the same kimono image. I stamped it as a background with watermark ink. The sentiment on this card is Stampin'Up. On both cards, the image of the kimono is slightly raised from the card surface with foam tape.