Pirate Day - Customer cards and crafts

Hey, hope you all had a great weekend...

In honor of the upcoming holiday ~ Talk like a Pirate Day ~ here are a few fun pirate themed cards and crafts for your amusement.

This first customer craft is by Eileen ~ She made a pendant with a domino and used our Pirate Skull and Crossbones rubber stamp. What an awesome and creative use of an old domino!

The next customer craft is by Rina ~ She used our Pirate and Parrot rubber stamp, and made this atc with other stamps by Just Johanna. A beautiful Black and White card!

This next card was done by me ~ I used our Pirate and Parrot, Pirate Skull and Crossbones and Swashbuckler Pirate Rubber Stamps. I drew the map myself with markers, cut the eyepatch out of black card stock, and embossed the stamp on with white embossing powder. The edges were ripped and sponged with brown dye ink, and the saying was done with computer.

This last fun craft was made with our Skull and Crossbones rubber stamp. ~ My sister and I made this eyepatch with black canvas and black elastic. We stamped the pirate with white pigment ink. Be sure to dry it or give it time to dry...

And here's her husband wearing the patch. (Actually it's just his head and a different body... heh heh :) )

Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day everyone!

ARRRGGGHHH!!!

Send us your cards and crafts so we can post your stuff too!!
And see more customer cards, crafts and rubber stamps at http://www.sideshowstamps.com/

Summer Card Contest Winners!!

Hey~ Sorry it took us so long to post the summer card contest winners, we've been trying all day, but alas, we've been victim to constant satellite outages...

However, here are the results!

First of all, we want to thank everyone who participated in our first contest! It was so much fun seeing what everyone came up with and receiving all those awesome cards. We're going to post all of the participant's cards eventually, because they were just too beautiful.

It was really hard to pick the winners, and we honestly couldn't choose one over the other, so to make things fair and impartial, we had our baby Dahlia help us! She drew 3 names from a "hat" (our leopard print fez).

First she shook the fez...

Then she picked the first place winner...

We'll announce them backwards. Drumroll please....
The third place winner is...

Emi Matsuoka!!! Congratulations! You win our Lil' Grab bag of 10 unmounted rubber stamps!
Here's Emi's fabulous card.


And in second place we have...

Rina Koibuchi!!! Congratulations! You win our Medium Grab bag of 15 unmounted rubber stamps!

Here's Rina's beautiful card.

And our first place winner is....

Eileen Bellomo!!!
Congratulations! You win our Macho Grab bag of 30 unmounted stamps! Yay!!
Here's her fabulous card.

"I looked through my stash of Sideshow stamps and found a few that are just perfect to commemorate summer. Also, my recent wonderful trip to Curacao didn't hurt. I saw plenty of palms, boats, parrots, but, I confess, no mermaids. However, this is what I came up with...The images are colored with watercolor pencils, crayons and chalk. I also used a lot of Glimmer Mist, though the golden shine doesn't come out so well in the scan." ~ Eileen

And then Dahlia ate the winner's names...

Have a great week everyone!
:)


See more cards, crafts and rubber stamps at www.sideshowstamps.com

Coffee Shop Googie Sign -Card

Happy Labor Day Weekend! Hope you all had a fun time with your families and friends.

I've been reading this great book from 1982 called "Blue Highway" by William Least Heat Moon. It's about his travels in 1978 when he drove the back roads and "blue highways" in order to search out and see the towns untouched by interstate highways, fast food chains and mini malls. Reading about his visits with eccentric characters in greasy spoon type diners and "4 calendar" cafes reminded me of this card I made a while back.

It is made with all of our googie coffee shop signs, and colored with blender pens, metallic gel pens, and sponged with dye ink.

For those of you unfamiliar with "googie" wikipedia describes it well:

"Googie, also known as populuxe or doo-wop, is a subdivision of futuristic architecture, influenced by car culture and the Space Age and Atomic Age, originating from Southern California in the late 1940s and continuing approximately into the mid-1960s. The types of buildings that were most frequently designed in a Googie style were motels, coffee houses and bowling alleys.
Features of Googie include upswept roofs, curvaceous, geometric shapes, and bold use of glass, steel and neon. Googie was also characterized by space-age designs that depict motion, such as boomerangs, flying saucers, atoms and parabolas, and free-form designs such as "soft" parallelograms and the ubiquitous artist's-palette motif. These stylistic conventions reflected American society's emphasis on futuristic designs and fascination with Space Age themes. The style is related to and sometimes synonymous with the Raygun Gothic style as coined by writer William Gibson. As with the art deco style of the 1930s, Googie became undervalued as time passed, and many buildings built in this style have been destroyed."

Sad....

We love "googie" here at Sideshow Stamps. The diners that serve that great homecooked food; the coffee shops where you can sit for hours and talk to complete strangers over a plate of home made pie; the motels that are clean and quaint but you're still a little afraid to touch the quilt on the bed; the offices, car washes, bowling alleys, and other such buildings that just had so much life and motion and character to their structure and design. Not to get into a big architecture rant, but have you seen the monotonous lifeless blocks they build these days? Boring...

On another note: Thank you to everyone who entered our summer card contest! We received some beautiful entries!!! We'll announce and post the winners on the 6th!

AND!!! Our new line of rubber stamps are here!!! A panda, bunny, sparrow, nautical star, ghost, gravestones, airstream type trailer and car, retro rocket and MORE!

Go check them out at www.sideshowstamps.com!!!

Have a great week all...

See more cards, crafts and rubber stamps at http://www.sideshowstamps.com/