Playing with my new toys!

Well, I accomplished a lot in my room tonight, but I'm not quite ready for the "big reveal" - still more cleaning needed! But, I did find my desk (yippee!) so I had to play a little more before going to bed. First off, I had to use my sweet little Living Large girl, because I am *so* sad she is being retired!! What is SU thinking?? I've also been collecting a bunch of new toys lately, but finally tried out several of them for this card! First and foremost, as you can probably guess - I gave in to all the Cuttlebug lust I was having and got one for myself!! I used it for the super cute Cool Caribbean happy birthday embossed panel. I'm really excited about it - I bought a Quickutz several years ago, but I rarely use it because I hate that stupid squeeze handle (Anyone want it? Leave me a comment if you do!). The Cuttlebug works with the Quickutz dies I already have, so I feel it was a good investment! Plus I have been just lovin' all the embossing everyone has been doing on their cards!! I had held out on getting one b/c I was incorrectly under the impression that Michael's wouldn't take 40% off coupons for them, but they do! Another new "toy" I used tonight are the gamsol and stumps I ordered from Inky Antics. I kept seeing references on different blogs (most often on TayloredExpressions) about coloring with Prismacolors, gamsol & a stump. Huh?? No idea what they were talking about, until I finally found a tutorial on SCS. Well... I WAS EXCITED!! I bought an amazing box of Prismacolor pencils many many MANY years ago (again, a 40% off purchase!), when I was first starting to scrapbook and would copy the hand-lettering they'd feature every month in Creating Keepsakes, a la Becky Higgins. Then letter stickers got to be a lot cuter and I gave up on this (as did CK!)! So my beautiful pencils, all 120 of them, were sitting on my shelf, gathering dust. I just never liked how they looked when I colored with them - I could see too many pencil marks. But the gamsol and stump works sooo well to blend it smooth & nice! I still need to get the hang of it - I have so many colors I need to figure out which pencils look good with the various SU colors, but I'm very happy to play with them!! Debbie Olson uses Prismacolors a lot too, but I asked her if she uses gamsol, and she does not!! Ohhh to be that talented, to blend & shade so perfectly without any extra help!! Someday... :-) The other new things on this card are the cute ribbon which inspired my color choices - a cheap wooden spool ribbon from Michael's. And the green polka dot paper is from my new Palette O' Prints pad from SU! I am totally loving the papers in that little pad - so cute!! Ok that's it for tonight, it's way late and I have no business being awake at this hour!! :-)