$3.65

Yay! The only good thing about the end of summer is that gas prices go down a bit.

And the battle continues...

The war against the tomato marauder continues. So far, we've tried chicken wire, chicken wire+bird netting, and black pepper. I think that just caused the creature to look for some olive oil and balsamic vinegar to add to his salad. We tried chicken wire on the bottom and bird netting on top in case it was a raccoon or a large opossum.

We tried bird netting around the chicken wire, in case it was something small (and disgusting) like a rat. The hope was it would get tangled in the bird netting. That didn't work either.

July card swap

Yes, I'm a little late in posting. Heck, I'll admit I'm a little late in getting the cards done. Once again, I forgot to take a picture of the kit so I stole this photo from Susan's blog. Laurie sent this kit and included a great Thank You stamp and some fun card bases, along with the other goodies you see here.

I has a little trouble with the black and white papers so I made just one card with those papers. The Happy Birthday stamp is from Unity.

I love how the colors came together in this card. The card base and blue paper is from the kit. The ribbon is from Peggy's May card kit. The dotted circles are Inkadinkado, ink is Versamark, and I used a Prisma pencil to color in the "Thank you."

Wendy posted her cards and I took a peek at them before I finished my cards and um, borrowed one of her ideas, which was to emboss the card front. I love how it looks. I broke out a new Cuttlebug folder for this one. The stamps are Studio G and the ink is Colorbox Mixed Media Ink By Donna Salazar, one of my new favorite inks.

Actually, what I like is the Colorbox ink, but I dislike the packaging. It has a round rubber base and the lid doesn't really seal; it just sits loosely on the rim. I suppose the rubber base allows for flexibility when inking up mixed media goodies, but I don't see that I'll be able to travel with these inks unless I tape them closed.

Please visit the rest of the cardmakers and leave them some comment love. They all did a much better job of mixing the black and white patterned papers with the bright colored papers/embellishments:

Susan:
http://simplysusansscrap.blogspot.com/

Katie:
http://www.2craftykaties.blogspot.com/

Peggy:
http://myviewfromthebleachers.blogspot.com/

Laurie:
http://www.scrapsfromthebeach.com/

We're taking a break for August so you'll see the next card kit in September.

Tomatoes, round two

So, the bird netting didn't work. I knew it was some sort of nocturnal creature, but I was hoping the netting would annoy and deter them. No such luck. The next attempt was to put netting around the tomatoes. This was the result:

Something is very persistent. I think I've thrown out over a dozen tomatoes so far. I'm a bit discouraged.