"eiffel for you"

I really hope I'm not the only one who gets my little pun here. "Eiffel" for you. As in, "I fell for you." As in, the Eiffel Tower??? If you say it with a sultry French accent it works even better!

Ha ha! Well my husband thought it was funny. Good thing because I think this may end up being his Valentine ;)

I tried the "shabby chic" look on this card...seemed fitting for a card with a French theme.

Stamps: Ooh La La, Olivia, Just Words, and So Swirly
Paper and flower: Making Memories "Noteworthy" collection
Ink: Ranger Distress inks
Ribbon: Bazzill
Scallop Border Punch: Martha Stewart

celebrate

This is Birthday card I made for a friend (and hopefully she doesn't see this post before she gets it!)

Stamps used: Shapes and Stitches
Ink: Versamark and Ranger Adirondack
Pin: Making Memories
Ribbon: Bazzill

what i'll be doing today....

relaxing at home with my hubby, kiddies, and some hot chocolate. Because when it snows like this in Seattle, the world STOPS. I don't think I've ever seen a snowplow here before...

little fairy princess

I've been working on some new samples to take to CHA with us and display in our booth. This is a little 8x8 scrapbooking page I made featuring our Fairy, our Samantha alphabet set, and stamps from our Funky Floral set. Funky Floral holds a special place in my heart because it is the first stamp set I've ever designed, and I thought the flowers and leaves in this set were very fairy-like. I found a lovely white 8x8 frame at the craft store to display this page in. My daughters room is decorated in a fairy and flowers theme, so after I am done using this at the show, it will find a nice home on her bookshelf!

New finds: I heard that Ranger Adirondack and Distress ink pads work really well with Copic markers...that the ink doesn't bleed. It's true! This page uses Ranger inks and I colored in my little Fairy with Copics and it worked beautifully. I didn't have a lot of Ranger inks before this week and I've solved that problem. ;) Another great find...see my cute embossed scallop edge on the photo? That is a Martha Stewart border punch...it both punches and embosses at the same time! Love it!

my heart is in stitches

I sewed on this Valentine. This is something I do not do often! I occasionally glance at my little sew machine over in the corner and think to myself, "I really need to stitch on my cards more often, I love that look." And then I choose something easier. Ha ha! It's just because I have not yet mastered the art of sewing, but I really do love the look. I sewed on this little card and I actually ended up using the back side of the stitch instead of the front, it looked better! :)

I made this our L.A.D. Sketch Challenge today. Show me your stitches!

Stamps used: Little Bits™ L'Amour and So Swirly

Happy Birthday Moms

That's right...Moms (plural.) Both my mother and my mother-in-law are celebrating their birthdays this week!

Doesn't that cake make you want to go out and get some red velvet cake? mmmmm. I heard they have red-velvet cupcakes at the cupcake store in Ballard. I am so there.

Stamps: L.A.D. Petite Phrases, Sketched Sentiments, and the flower from It's a Party
Chipboard "M" from Cosmo Cricket
Red Copic Marker
Bazzill Ribbon
Ink: Brilliance Red and SU Old Olive
Bazzill Smoothie Cardstock

{you} are in my heart

I love this card...I've been excited to show it to you. This was very easy to do, and if you have school-aged kids who need to make Valentines for their classmates, I think this would be a great card to make. It only uses one color of ink...red! We have a heart-shaped swirl in our So Swirly set that I used to decorate the edge of a cream card. The great thing about the swirls is you really can't go wrong...no matter how the swirl lands on the page or overlaps other swirls it's going to look cute. I did this around the edge 3 times, and then I inked up the dove from our L' Amour set and stamped him next to the swirls. The Dove could even overlap the swirls more than I've shown here. I then added some hearts (I love the heart with the word "you" in it, which is what inspired my blog title today.) I took out my pastels and added a little pink to the images to give them a soft look, and that was it! Your kids could easily do this with a little help from a steady hand.

I used the Be Mine sentiment on the tag which is just a strip of paper that has been rounded with a Corner Rounder Punch. Happy Valentine's Day would also work there (we can't get too mushy with the kid Valentine now, can we?) And you might want to leave the heart pin off the kids version. But a little ribbon somewhere, a heart-shaped sucker taped inside (or on the back if it's one-sided) and it's ready to go into your kids hand-made, foil-covered Valentine's Day boxes with the little red and pink construction hearts. :)

I'll be including another kid-friendly Valentine in our newsletter this month.

Stamps: So Swirly and L'Amour
Paper: Cloud 9 Design
Heart Pin: Fancy Pants
Pink and White striped Ribbon
Red Ink

flowers x 3

This is a card for our current L.A.D. Sketch Challenge! I've used our Floral Frenzy set paired with a sentiment from Dreaming of Dots. I took the additional challenge to make it pink and green...always one of my favorite color combinations. When I was a little girl, everything I had was pink and green. My room and the wallpaper, my clothes, I wanted everything those colors. Still love em' today! :) I've you'd like to join us and try your hand at one of our sketch challenges, you can find them here. You don't have to always do the current sketch, you are welcome to try a sketch from a previous sketch too!

Want some free stamps? Zee is doing a L.A.D. little Blog Candy right now...

in the mood for love

This weekend I went to two of my LSS's (in this case, local scrapbook *and* stamp stores) and found myself surrounded by all kinds of Valentine's Day goodies. I had to pick myself up a few! My favorite find were these heart-shaped pins by Fancy Pants...I made three different cards using pins! Another great thing about this weekend is I got together with my girlfriends for a stamp/scrapping night and managed to get a lot of cards made that I love...I didn't even gab much! Okay well I gabbed about half the time. But I did make some cute cards!

This card features three different Little Bits sets...our Daisy Dots, Heart to Heart, and Just Words sets. Daisy Dots has always been one of my favorite sets because of the way you can customize the center dot sentiment. It's truly an all-occasion set. The chipboard pieces are from Cosmo Cricket and there is that cute Fancy Pants pin I told you about. I don't recommend the pin-card for kids, for obvious reasons, ha ha. But they would be perfect for your sweetheart.

I've posted another Valentine on our forum today. I invite you to post your favorite L.A.D. Valentine there or in our Customer Gallery and share the love with your fellow stampers. Kiss Kiss everyone!

a little birdie card and an announcement

Hi everyone! I was was hoping to post to my blog earlier today, but instead spent the day sopping up water out of my carpet from a broken pipe. *sigh.* Yes it's been one of those days.... :)

Crisis averted, and now and I'm ready to post my latest card sample and do our little announcement. I realize that this is probably not the announcement you expected..ha ha ha...its in no way as big as our sneak peeks have been. First the card. Meridith and I chose sets to feature in our sneak peeks so this is the first time I've been able to play with In the Treetop....and oh, I see *lots* of tree cards in my future. I just love this set. I stamped the "No Winter Lasts Forever.." sentiment from our Say it in Script set on the inside of the card. Isn't it lovely?

Now on to the announcement...

As some of you know, we have been participating in the SCS Member Company Program. This is a new program and we, as well as the other Member Companies, signed up for a 3-month trial period to see if the forum was a good fit for our particular companies. Over the past three months we have learned a lot about our company and our customers. What we have learned is that we have lots of customers who frequent SCS on a regular basis, but that we *also have a lot of customers coming from elsewhere.* This is a GOOD thing for our company...it means we are being visited by all kinds of people from all kinds of places. However, we have been posting a lot of important company information on our SCS forum knowing that not everyone has been seeing it.

You may have noticed that we have recently added our own company forum to our website. We did this so we can more effectively communicate with all our customers.

So, we now have two forums. It is very time-consuming to maintain one forum let alone two. With this in mind, we have decided it would be best to close our SCS Forum and utilize the forum on our website where it is more "connected" to our company. We have loved getting to know all of you better and cherish the friendships we have made, and we hope to continue this on our own forum! We will continue to post our sketch challenges where you are welcome to post your samples (or link to your SCS gallery) there, and we would love to have you come and chit-chat with us at any time! Meridith will even be moving her famous crock-pot recipe thread there, ha ha! Our SCS Forum will close at midnight on January 14th.

We will continue to support Splitcoast through our banner ads and other advertising, and we will be popping in on the threads too so we're not going anywhere SCS Members! We'll be around! We love the SCS folk and everything they have done for us.

Thanks so much for your support everyone! We look forward to the upcoming year as we continue to grow and make cute stamps. :)

xoxo,
"Lizzie"

from the mouths of babes...

Me: "Hunny, get your shoes on and hop in the car. Mommy needs to go to the post office and then Starbucks."

5-year-old son: "TWO places? Mom, I'm just really too busy for dat. This is cutting into my t.v. time."

had to share that one. :)

www.wow.com

okay lame post title...ha ha!

But I had to share how much traffic our site has seen since we started our Sneak Peek last week, I checked it this morning and my jaw hit the floor! So exciting!

Views to the Sneak Peek page: 4,907
Total Website Page Views: 53,873

Over 50,000 page views this week....holy cow!!!!!!!!!! :)

Thanks everyone...you have no idea how much this means to us!

BTW this was *not* the announcement I mentioned yesterday. That will come Thursday now. I'm swamped and need to time to make a card sample before I post. ha ha!
I'll be back soon...

Dreamin...

In case you missed it, we've revealed our 11th and final set, Dreaming of Dots. It's a beauty! We wanted to end the party with a Wow! Did we Wow you?

Thanks so much for joining us in our sneak peeks this week...it's been so much fun watching you all lurk on our sneak peek page! And the pre-release party was quite funny...I couldn't keep up with all your posts and I lost my way there a few times. We've got some fast-typin customers, I must say! I'm impressed! :)

Now it's time to get back to doing more of what we love best...STAMPING! (Well after we fill all your orders. ;)

I have an important announcement to make thursday. Stay tuned.

Give-Away Winner!

I had my son choose the winning number (you can't get any more random than that now, can you? :) and he's chosen #18...which is Jen! Jen from Stamping with Jen!

Jen, send me an email with your shipping address and I'll send out the It's a Party and Cupcake stamps to you! Congrats!

Sneak Peek Day #5

I've been very excited to show you these samples from our new Far East set. I think this set has so many possibilities. I've always loved and been inspired by modern Asian floral design. And this set captures some of my favorite images...


The cherry blossom branch

This branch comes pre-adorned with dots, and then there are two little flowers that you can use to decorate your branch with! I've used the small cherry-blossom, and there is another one that is more of a designy blossom. We also have that cute little lantern that you can hang from the branch!



Bamboo leaves

I love the shape of these leaves...I stamped this image three times and made it stretch to the top of my card.


The Lotus Flower

This decorative lotus flower has both the background stamp and the swirly stamp to go over the top. I got a little artsy with this one. I really enjoyed playing with these three colors...red, cream, and black.

You may have noticed the sentiments I used on these three cards. The top two are part of the Far East set and the last card features a sentiment from the Say it in Script set. The Far East set was designed first and we loved how those sentiments turned out so much we decided to design a whole new sentiments set in that style! :)

There you have it folks. Oh, except that we have one more set to reveal tomorrow night at the pre-release party! He he. We went a little crazy this time, we know. We're heading to Winter CHA soon and wanted to have a nice fat catalog to take with us. The pre-release party is tomorrow night on our SCS Forum from 7:00-9:00pm PST. More information posted here.

P.S...did you see our cute Pirate and Ahoy Matey stamps on Meridith's blog yet? We considered doing "Ahoy Me Hearties" for the sentiment, but I just couldn't get Captain Featherswords voice out of my head when I said it. ha ha! We're liking Ahoy Matey. And there is a companion set to Just Words now too! :)

virtual chocolate

just sending a little quick virtual chocolate out to a friend who is feeling a little down today.

hope this makes you feel a bit better (and it's calorie-free too!)

Sneak Peek Day #4

Attention nature lovers! You're gonna love this one. The sample above features our new In the Meadow set. It was designed by Katie S.,a very good friend of mine...the same friend who designed our Au Naturale set. Katie is very good at drawing life-like illustrations. She and her husband are the most artsy-fartsy people I know (she'll laugh at that) and I just love being around them...I almost feel more creative after a night in their company. Both of them are artists...Katie draws and paints and throws pottery on the wheel and went to Art School at the U with us, and husband Peder is a graphic designer. They have *original* artwork hanging in their home...paintings by artist friends and Peder's prints (like letterpressed artwork? check this out) and Katie's drawings. I asked Katie to do up some wildflowers/meadowy type flowers for us. The card above features the Indian Paintbrush. Isn't is beautiful?

We are also unveiling our Say it in Script sentiments set, our Ballerina, and our Ballerina saying today...Meridith is showing samples featuring those stamps!

My give-away is still going on down below...I'll choose a winner Sunday afternoon.

hey cupcake...

...I had to share my birthday cupcakes with you. Their names are Vanilla Bean Dream and Pure Joy. mmmmmmmmmm.

I'll be back in a bit to post Sneak Peak #4....

Sneak Peek Day #3

Today's post is all about parties and celebrations and birthdays. And yes, it is indeed my birthday today. So in honor of my birthday, I wanted to do two things...announce the sneak peek of our It's a Party set and Cupcake single, AND I'm having a blog give-away! See below...



I created the It's a Party set one night after I was trying to make some cute invites and could find no party-themed sentiments that were working. I wanted just plain ol' party talk...a big PARTY word, some cute "it's a party" and "save the date" type stuff. Here it is! The big scallop stamp is big enough for you to write a name in and works perfectly with the Marvy Mega Scallop Punch. I paired this set with our Blissful Blossoms set and turned it into a flower!



This card features our new Cupcake single. I am in love with cupcakes. Cupcakes are cool! I told my husband that for my birthday today I want to go to the cupcake store at the mall. Yes, it's a cupcake store...they sell nothing but cupcakes! And they look just like this stamp...a cupcake with one big huge swirl of frosting on top. They come in flavors like "Black Tie" and "Death by Chocolate" and "Peppermint Stick." Yum.

We also have brought back our Loads of Fun stamp, now as a single! This is the perfect stamp for a little-boy's birthday card. I've used it MANY times (as I have a little boy with lots of little boy friends.)

GIVE-AWAY:

Reply back to this post and let me know which of the new release stamps you've seen so far are your favorite! I'll choose a winner on Sunday with a random number selector, and that person will win the It's a Party set *and* the Cupcake single. And no guessing how old I am!

I'm really wanting a cupcake right now...

Sneak Peek Day #2

What do frogs, bugs, princesses, and chocolate all have in common? (Besides being some of my favorite things...)

They are all images found in our new Once Upon a Time and Petite Phrases sets!

That's right! If you have a girly girl in the family (young or old) or you need to make a quick, yet fun card with the perfect sentiment, one of these sets will do nicely.

I have three samples for you today! The first two feature the Petite Phrases set. Buggin Ya is the perfect every-day kind of card. I paired it with some purple polka-dots from our In the Background set.


And then this bright, lemony card I made for my husband for Valentine's Day. I paired it up with some hearts from our Heart to Heart set...pucker up baby!



This is the tag from a Baby Lunch Box I made for my sister for Christmas. She is pregnant and so I filled it full of baby stuff. She is not a gender-peeker like I am, so I had to use gender-neutral colors. I used the Baby Carriage single on this as well...if you'd like to see the whole project, head over to our Sketchbook and go to the New Stamp Release category, and you can see it there!

Meridith has some Once Upon a Time samples on her blog for you today. So go sneak a peek!

Sneak Peek Day #1

Let the peeking begin! Today we are unveiling:

In the Treetop (Little Bits set)
Fun to be Floral (Little Bits set)
Winged Mother (Simply Single)
Wonderful Mother (Simply Single)



I have two samples to show you. The first is a scrapbook page of my daughter featuring the Fun to be Floral set. I just love how girlie these flowers are, I thought they were perfect for a scrapbook page featuring this beautiful shot of my daughter. Fun to be Floral was designed by one of our Design Team Members, Joslyn. We were thrilled when she told us she was interested in designing a set for us! She has a give-away on her blog today, so go check it out and you may win this set!



The second card features both the Fun to be Floral set and one of our mother's singles. We designed some mother-themed sayings because Mom is so often the recipient of our handmade cards...and not just for Mother's Day (though won't these come in handy for Mother's Day too?!)

Meridith is previewing some cards she's done featuring the In the Treetops set, a very fun tree-inspired set. I just love one of the sentiments in this set...

"Trees teach us to stay grounded, but also to never stop reaching for the sky."

Wonderful words to live by.

See you tomorrow...

It's a New Year...

I'm about to post my Sneak Peek samples here in a few hours, but I had to sneak in these photos of my husband and my son from last night at Zena's New Years Eve party.


This is a cute photo of my son celebrating at midnight...it's scrap-worthy, don't you think?


Zena and her husband are Karaoke fans and we had some fun last night singing to the 80's. This is a photo of my husband singing to Twisted Sister. HA HA HA! Oh this will be a photo I will forever cherish (and blackmail him with.) I did plenty of singing myself but won't show you. (okay Zee has a shot of me on her blog if you really must see it.)



I'll be back later...