Back with some Mo's

Hi and Happy Monday! Thought I'd share some cards made with a digital stamp from Mo's Digital Pencil Too. For a limited time, Mo offered this digi called "What's Cookin'?" for $1, with proceeds from the sale going to Japan for the victims of the recent earthquake/tsunami.

This little girl so reminds me of my older daughter who just loves to bake. I think I'll be sending this to her with a copy of "Two Bite Cupcakes" for her to try. The papers are from Memory Box and the border die is from Tim Holtz. I hand dyed the seam binding and the button is handmade by the talented Fimo queen, Jane.

I also made this tag and was going to enter this in Lily Pad's Color Challenge, but I missed the deadline.
The background is stamped with Hero Arts Envelope Pattern and I used some washi tape to attach the image to the tag.

The sentiment was handstamped using an awesome set of Studio G alpha stamps that I got years ago for $1! Such a great deal.


So far, "What's Cookin'?'" has raised $500 with proceeds going to Hands on Tokyo and GlobalGiving. I'm happy to support Mo's and all the other stamp companies who started fundraisers for such a great humanitarian cause.

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And I'm super excited to share that my Flickr friend Ivy is making a return visit to our islands and I'm hoping I'll get to see her, Eddie, and the B-boys--Brandon and Bryan! Will post pics of our meeting in a future post.

Thanks for stopping by today......have a wonderful week!

Randomness

Sharing a few more pics from our trip to Japan.

In Odaiba, we stopped by a Toyota showroom and they featured these colorful cars with designs that were made by school children. They had a contest and chose the winning designs and put them on little Toyotas. This one caught my eye because it was cute and must have been done by a girl.

Here's a display of a (fake) sushi tower in a restaurant window in Osaka:

Glorious Mt. Fuji, as seen from a bullet train, after Typhoon Melor passed through:

Thousands of origami cranes at a memorial for mobilized students in Hiroshima:

And.....a can of SPAM that we saw in a Tokyo supermarket, selling for 662¥! Equivalent to $7.25US.

Hope to finish up and share some cards tomorrow. Feeling a little blah today with the cloudy weather and a mild case of acid reflux. Thanks for stopping by...have a great day!

Finally, a card!

Yay, I finally feel almost back to normal! Normal enough to pick up my new Copics and color this Miss Anya while I watched "Glee". Love that show!

I was so happy to get C5, C7, and C9 in Japan to color black hair as Oozak has been out of them for the longest time. (A lot of colors coming in on the 20th, so they say.) It was interesting to see that a lot of the young girls in Japan do not have black hair and seem to like the auburn or light brown look. After a while, they all started to look the same no matter where we were--like they were cloned!

Don't look too closely at the hair highlighting. I didn't know what I was doing as I got down to the bottom. Still need lots of practice...

Copics and cranes

At Hiroshima, we visited the Peace Museum and I saw a display of tiny origami cranes. They were the actual cranes folded by Sadako Sasaki, a young girl who was a victim of the atomic bomb that was dropped over Hiroshima in 1945. She developed leukemia as a result of exposure to the radiation and her classmates folded a thousand cranes with the hope that she would be cured.

She continued to fold them even after the thousand were completed and used whatever type of paper she could find--cellophane, gum wrappers. I was humbled by how neatly they were folded and the fact that she created little works of art with what she had. Apologies for the dark photo but we weren't allowed to use flash in the museum.

And for anyone who's interested, here's a shot of my Kokuyo stash--love the yellows!--and the 19 Copics that I got. I thought I bought a dozen but 19 is a nice number. I should have rounded it off to 20.

Home!

We arrived home this morning after a 6-1/2 hour, over the ocean, through the international date line return trip from Narita Airport. Everything went smoothly through customs and I showed the agent my declaration form with "Art Supplies" on it. Yep, my 27-inch, 43 lb. suitcase held about a dozen Copics and some Kokuyo tape and refills and I proudly declared them!

I actually screamed as we turned the corner at the Loft and there were the rows and rows of Copics--Sketch markers, Originals, and Ciaos. Felt badly that I scared a poor little old lady and politely shoved a teenager on the side just so I could marvel at the display. Then my daughter gave me a shopping basket and wished me well. I was in heaven.

Japan is the birthplace of Copics and Kokuyo tape, too. I watched a video on a new Kokuyo tape that you can stamp just a square of glue if you want to affix, say a postage stamp. Pretty cool. I'm sure it'll be making its way to the US very soon.

Oh, the food was great:

and the scenery was awesome and Tokyo Tower and the Rainbow Bridge are both marvelous structures.

But for me, getting my hands on those Copics was a definite highlight of the trip. I picked up twelve of my "most wanted" colors and my sweet hubby encouraged me to get more but I'm quite satisfied with what I got and managed to fill in more spaces on the Copics color chart (thank you, Maylee!)

We didn't get to see any changes in the colors of the foliage--our guide said October is too early--so we'll probably have to return to Japan in a few months to see that--and pick up more Copics!

Will post more pics after I get over this jetlag. It's good to be home.

60 days?!

I just caught a glimpse of the countdown clock and didn't realize it was 60 days till our trip to Japan! Yikes! SOMEbody has to start exercising because we'll be doing a ton of walking! We'll be visiting the deer at Nara Park again. That was one of the highlights from our previous trip and we were so amazed at how tame the deer were. In this photo, Keith is taking a photo of us while Joy is snapping a pic of Jamie and a young deer. Just can't wait.....60 more days!