Ugh, How Ugly!

Once upon a time, there were two LTC swaps in which the participants were to use the ugliest paper in their collections and to just cut it up and stamp it. No embellishments. Participants in each swap would vote on the ugliest card in each swap and the winners would receive a special, one of a kind LTC as a prize.

Group 1 winner: Pink and Green Psychedelic Vomit by The Red Cat
Group 2 winner: Hey, Who You Callin' Ugly? by FreezyCat of Bikercats

We decided to have a little friendly competition and see which paper the LTC community thinks is the ugliest. We both think our respective cards are eye-searing, but here's a chance to let your opinions be known!

Here they are in no particular order:

Hey, Who You Callin' Ugly


Pink and Green Psychedelic Vomit


So, which one is uglier?

Seriously, does it need to be this cold?

As I'm sure most of you have heard, the Midwest is under a severe cold snap right now. It's a brisk -6 with a -26 windchill right now. It's supposed to get down to -20 tonight with a -35 windchill. It does not need to be this cold. Seriously.

One of my favorite things to do when it gets this cold is to bury myself under a blanket with a cup of tea and a good book. I'm currently working on Stardust by Neil Gaiman and The World Without End by Ken Follett. A nice fantasy book and a huge historical epic-perfect for forgetting how cold it is outside.

The LTC featured in this post is called "Reading Pixie" and was made for a Fairy swap. The little pixie is so cute-I love his antennae. It's stamped in brown on tea-stained paper that I printed part of Mr Simonelli, or The Fairy Widower, a short story by Susanna Clarke, one of my favorite authors. I figured using a story about fairies would be appropriate, even though most people would have no idea what the story is. There's also a little rhinestone under the pixie. I wasn't quite sure about the orange paper and the burgundy background, but I think it works in a weird kind of way.

Studio Ghibli

I'm a huge Miyazaki fan. Howl's Moving Castle is one of my all time favorite movies.

This card is called Studio Ghibli Logo (very creative title, eh?) and was made for a Studio Ghibli postal ring. It was a little bonus present for members of the ring. The stamp was originally carved for another Miyazaki postal ring. It was my first time carving Japanese and I think it turned out pretty well. Also some of the smallest letters I have ever carved.

Another thing that I've noticed by looking through my cards is that I love using origami paper. And, yes, this one uses origami paper. :) I used a pack of blue-themed paper and each card has a different blue paper background. I love the texture of this paper-it feels like very thick rice paper. Usually when I use origami paper, I'll mount it on cardstock since the origami paper is very, very thin.

I have another Miyazaki LTC available, Lupin III: Lupin and His Gang if there are any Miyazaki fans out there who would like one. And yes, that one has origami paper as well. :)

I have a ton of Miyazaki stamps lying around (mostly of Howl's Moving Castle and Lupin III), so expect more Miyazaki/Ghibli cards from me.

The Snow Queen

Wow...I'm really bad at this whole blogging thing. :P I've been kept busy between finishing up the term, being sick and the whole holiday thing. So here's an LTC that fits the season. We're in the midst of a winter storm here in Minnesota (there's "freezing drizzle" right now according to weather.com-I'm not venturing outside to check).

The Snow Queen was made for a regular bi-monthly swap. This was the first card that I made for that group. The theme was winter, so I turned to the Hans Christian Anderson tale. I love old illustrations for fairy tales and I love how this stamp turned out. It's just stamped on plain white paper that I mounted on a metallic white card stock and a stripe of metallic icy blue cardstock. The colors are really pale, so they don't show up too well in the scan, but I love the sheen of the papers. The faint little dots are course glitter that I sprinkled on the blue paper. I wanted it a little more glittery, but the glitter looks a lot like the heavy snow that we sometimes get, so I traded glittery for snowy. This was the third LTC that I made and I've found that I like using the whole "stripe of contrasting paper" thing on a lot of my cards. My cards are usually about the stamp, so it's a good way to showcase the stamp image.