Monday, July 9, 2012

Layers!?!?

I KNOW!!!! Shocking, but true. THREE layers.



PTI Vintage cream base, SU close to cocoa mat, and PTI white stamped layer. I tried to make it without the mat but it just looked weird. The twine is also from PTI. Because of the somewhat lumpy knot, I didn't pop any of the layers with dimensionals.

I rather like the soft, rustic stamped frame and the blotchy horse with the frayed twine...and everything else nice and crisp and clean. This is how obsessive compulsive stampers do cowboy.

Works for me!

And yes, I used a white eraser on the horse in hopes of getting better images in the future. It worked.

So tell the interwebs all about a time you didn't at first succeed and had to saddle up again. I have had several job hunts that felt like that, and of course there was the whole organic chemistry debacle my freshman year at Duke. I decided to saddle up a completely different horse and majored in English instead. And there was also my search-for-my-personal-stamping-style that forced me to saddle up repeatedly for about seven years.

An apropos sentiment for my life. How about yours? The best story gets the card!

Supplies
stamps: PTI On the Farm
ink: Memento
paper: PTI, SU
accessories: twine, glue dot





10 comments:

  1. I like your card, especially the sentiment.

    ReplyDelete
  2. So, how long do you have? My rocky road from wanting to be an art teacher and actually becoming a hairdresser to the HR Administrator I am today took me thru many different saddles and several horses of different colors. All in all, I liked each one and who I was at each junction.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Bwahahaha! Saddle up again? With each of my four dear offspring as they hit the teen mark: DD @ 16 dutifully adhering to her grounding until I went to the bathroom and *poof* out the door for the night; DS#1 @17 whose slippery trouble with truth led to many an adventure; DS#2 @18 who faked college for 2 weeks until caught; and DS#3 @18 who got caught in the ultimate "mom and dad who unexpectedly came home from Lake Tahoe and caught him in the ultimate party" Ahem. I want a do-over with my parenthood! Thank you, Susan for your great inspirational blog (and the first/only Thanksgiving card I've ever received!)

    ReplyDelete
  4. My story is, quite literally, about horses. As all young girls do, I loved horses. When I was 4, my mom & dad and sibs went to a carnival that had Shetland ponies all tied to a merry-go-round type of contraption so kids could just ride around and around in circles. Even at that young age I was impatient and wanted immediate results, not the slow meanderings of the slow-poke ponies. One or two trips around was getting boring. My favorite TV shows were all about cowboys on fast horses. I'd seen what they did to make them go faster -- kick 'em in the flanks. So...that's exactly what I did. The pony bucked me off. I don't remember why or how (the guy running the thing was no doubt smoking or chatting up a sweet young thing at the carnival), but I got back on. I still wanted to go faster, so kicked the horse again. That time, the carny did see what I'd done and I was banned from the horse ride. I remember crying and wailing, "Hopalong and Roy Rogers do it all the time!" Our family still laughs about it. The card brought it all back into my memory. If it wasn't past my brothers' bedtimes, I'd call them and laugh about it again. "Hey, remember that time...."

    ReplyDelete
  5. Great card! Love the layers, the rustic horse image and the twine (rope.) :) No "saddle up again" stories here, although, I do have a literal horse story. One of my most favorite memories is the three-day weekend I spent horseback riding in Big Bear, Idaho. Breathtaking, gorgeous scenery! :)

    ReplyDelete
  6. Great card - sometimes a great image just needs a frame! lol! As for resaddling - I do it all the time - that's what keeps life interesting!

    ReplyDelete
  7. I'm a stay at home mom of 2, so I repeatedly fall off my horse every single day! :) But I saddle back up again every time!

    ReplyDelete
  8. Weight loss for me. After trying all the shortcuts, I saddled up and did it the old-fashioned way - I ate less and exercised more. Of course, some came back after two kids and now my life is in such perpetual disarray that I can't even find the horse, let alone find the time to take it out for a ride.

    Wonderful card!

    ReplyDelete
  9. I love this card!! Probably because I've always loved horses. As for saddling up again, my life has been pretty smooth in that way so no great "starting over" stories unless, of course, you want to count 3 broken engagements in my 20s... giving up on men and marriage and settling for the single career life until I met a wonderful man 29 years after the last broken engagement. We've been happily married for 7 years now. Oh... and I guess it is saddling up again to start a new life like that since I had to give up my career of over 26 years because I'm going blind. It has definitely been a life change to give up the career I had planned since I was in the second grade, get married late in life, adjust to a disability and move across the country away from al I had ever know before to do it. Yes... the man I met and married didn't live next door... he lived over 1100 miles from where I had spent most of my life.

    And then there is the real horseback riding story. A friend and I were on vacation and decided to go horseback riding along the Oregon coast. Well, having been horseback riding at many places like this before, I was so tired of how these stables who rent horses to tourists always seemed to have over worked, half dead horses that moved at a snail's pace. Not to mention the fact that they usually looked like they were at death's door. I know... the stables don't want to get sued so they give you a horse they think can't possibly hurt you. Well, as we were getting ready to mount up, I told the person matching us up with our horses that I wanted a pretty horse! LOL!! At least if he was going to move at a snail's pace we would look good doing it. So, they brought over this gorgeous and very tall horse and up I went. I was a happy camper and off we headed for the beach. Well once on the beach I realized that this horse was not half dead and wanted only to run and it was all I could do to hold him back at the pace my friend and our guide were going. So, down the beach we went enjoying the wonderful scenery as I constantly fought to keep the horse from taking off. There were all sorts of rock formations along the beach and my horse and I had just gone through a natural arch formation when the horse was spooked and rared up on his hind legs and threw me off. Thank goodness I was shocked more than hurt. The horse was so tall and I'm only 5'3" so, it was a little difficult, but the guide helped me get right back up on the horse and I finished the ride. I was never really scared but the friend I was with was worried the horse would throw me again. She was worried enough for both of us and I was just enjoying the ride. I have a photograph of us on our horses on the beach and it's one of my favorite vacation memories.

    ReplyDelete

Thank you so much for taking time to comment!