Looking back in time: a visit to my friend Kathy's art palace

Some of you have been with me for awhile, and you've read about my camera woes.  It all started when I visited my friend Kathy this summer for three days.  I inadvertently "ruined" my camera where I tried to upload the sim card to an-email from her Hewlett Packard 4-in-1.  HP put a ghost file on my camera that I could not access and I could not download the file needed to correct the problem.  I have Annette (Voodoo Vixen) to thank for diagnosing the problem. In frustration, I gave my camera to Scott (my computer guru friend) to see what he could do, and I went out and bought a cheap (REALLY, REALLY cheap) replacement.

To make a long story longer, I won't go into the various things I did to try to get a decent camera and/or sim card replacement for my old camera.  Instead, I will tell you that my friend Scott NEVER lets me down.  So today I'm going to take you back to this summer with a visit to my friend Kathy's, where we will make art, play with die cutters, and share three days of fun and excitement, while Bleubeard holds down the home front.

Please remember these photos were taken from my old camera and they don't enlarge any further.

I love grain elevators and took photos along the way to Kathy's home.  After all, the city she lives in has one of the longest grain elevators in the world at a mile long.

Although I don't remember pulling fairly certain I didn't pull over, I know I shot these photos, so I suspect I was speeding along the highway, more than likely putting life and limb in harm's way.

Yep, pretty sure I was flying, as this photo shows.

No wonder my sim card was full the second day I was at Kathy's!

The off ramp to Kathy's house.  It wouldn't be long now.

When I walked into Kathy's black and white zebra inspired room, Kathy was still in the shower.  It gave me time to take a few shots of her palace.

I absolutely adore Kathy's ribbon rack.  You can see in the far right corner of the photo, where she's already brought out a few of her unmounted stamps.  She wants to make cards, and I want to learn to use the die cutter she gave me.

She seems to have some ideas in mind because she has her guilloutine cutter out and several punches, too.

By this time Kathy has joined me, and told me about the wedding dress she bought for her zebra striped manikin. 

An idea she got from Pinterest was to use wine racks to hold her vast collection of pens.

She also had her die cutter out ready to go, too.  The black "thing" on the far right of the photo is the printer/scanner/etc. that killed crippled my sim card.

Kathy had a few magazines she wanted to use as inspiration, while I drank my coffee and she sipped her diet RC.

It was time for me to unpack my bag.  All the art supplies I would need for the weekend were in my go bag.

We had previously decided the first thing we would do was to make some shimmering mists.  I brought a few bottles, the glue, and the shimmery pigment powders.  Kathy supplied the distilled water and a few of her own bottles.  If you've never seen how I make them, you can see the first time I made them here.

Kathy is shaking two jars at once, and already has the hard-to-remove ink all over her hands.

Although you can't see all that beautiful shimmer, Kathy saw it, and was really impressed with these mists.  She originally thought we were making the same kind she has purchased in the past that don't have mica in them.

Now that the mists had been made and background papers created, it was time for a light lunch of fruit and cookies.  Somehow the fruit was supposed to balance out the cookies Kathy bought for us to munch on.

After lunch, we put all the shimmering mists away and got out the die cutters.  Kathy's sister (who recently died of cancer) gave her the Big Shot on the left, at which time Kathy gave me the Big Kick.  But there were NO instructions with it, so I waited till we had time together (and not a typical shopping day for Kathy) to play with it.

But Kathy wanted to make cards, so she printed out some instructions and card bodies on her printer.

Once the obligatory Father's Day cards were out of the way, Kathy showed me how to use the die cutter.  I wanted to make a page for my Summer Of Color entry, which was orange and pink that week.  This shows the order, although all the dies you will see belong to Kathy.

This looks like an embellishing folder, but Kathy kept the piece that originally came with my die cutter because I have no embellishing folders.  I can't remember what the piece looks like, but I know I can't emboss without it.  However, I got to play with hers that day.

This would have been used on SOC to show the intermediate steps, if only I'd had the sim card working.  You can see I used many of Kathy's butterfly stamps in the colors of the week.

While I was cutting and stamping butterflies, Kathy made this incredibly beautiful card.

Here are the three cards she made over the next two days.  Note she got many ideas from pins on Pinterest.  Note also, the killer printer (4-in-1) in the background.  As an aside, I am really ashamed of the photo quality from my old camera.  I'm really thrilled with my new one, and it was the killer printer that helped me make my decision to buy a good camera.

All that while I was working on my SOC entry for the week.

Here was another card she made early on day 2 of my visit.

Then it was time for me to show Kathy how to bleach paper using another butterfly.  After I made these first two, we took the solution outside because the smell became unbearable.

Kathy decided to get out her copics and paint a butterfly, while I set up her sewing machine and sewed a few wet wipes together that we had used to clean our shimmering mists messes.

I love the look of wet wipes, but I don't use them.  I know I should, but I don't seem to find a need for them.  These are going to make a great interior for a scrappy journal, though.

I took a short break and photographed the outside of Kathy's altered art palace.  You can see the hook that holds her ribbons on the back of the door.

While taking some trash out, I ran into Kathy's husband, Don, a died-in-the-wool Nebraska fan.  And I thought I had a lot of rocking horses!  He has so many Nebraska artifacts, it isn't funny.

It was at this time, I decided to try to send some of my photos home.  That's when my sim card got corrupted and I could no longer take photos.  Guess you could say "That's all, folks!"  Hope you had as much fun as I had.