Smooch ink, Glimmer Mist and spiders

I was on a bit of a roll yesterday. I finished my final card very late - too late to photograph it and show it here, and besides, you probably had enough of my cards for one day. But today's a new day (here!) and here's a new card.

Remember I said my squirts of Smooch ink on the bird were a little generous? Well it was lucky I was using a piece of plastic packaging on top of my newspaper on the floor, because I ended up with quite a puddle of glimmery brown and sparkly green. And I'm not one to waste stuff like that! I grabbed up all the scraps I could see: the circles I'd cut from the cards, some bits of white card, a scrap of patterned paper that was waiting to go on the next card - and wiped them all into my puddle to see what happened. And I got some very interesting effects!

When I went to post my second card yesterday, I realised that even though it was brown and yellow (on purpose) it didn't qualify for the Whiff of Joy challenge because it didn't have a Whiff of Joy stamp on it... and even though I'd punched the leaves especially for the Basic Grey challenge, I'd forgotten to use any BG paper on it... aagh where was my brain yesterday??? Hence the late-night card, using a piece of Basic Grey Scarlett's Letter paper and a pre-coloured Willow from Whiff of Joy, which had been shifted around my desk waiting to be used for literally months. And with a Martha Stewart border punch, some ribbon from G, sentiment from Quixotic Paperie and my experimental inked paper with an ancient stamp, this is what I got:

I used this sketch from Sketch Saturday and I THINK I got all the criteria covered!

One more thing. If you're arachnophobic, don't scroll down any further!














Last weekend DH was working hard in the garden, and he noticed a not-so-little friend watching him from the bottom corner of the garage door:

She's about an inch and a half in size. Being me, I got the camera out and took some photos - up really close. Then last night we did some surfing, and made our toes curl by reading about how venomous Australian spiders are and how they jump on you... Well thank GOODNESS this one didn't! After an hour of scaring the living daylights out of ourselves, we still don't know what she is. Either a quite venomous but docile Black House Spider (but they usually live at the tops of doors or windows and this wasn't) or an assertively venomous Wolf Spider but they're ground-dwelling, or a death-on-legs Funnel Web, but they're also ground dwelling and they're fierce. So if anyone can help identify her, please feel free!

While we were surfing, we found this photo of a Huntsman Spider which I absolutely love: in a horror film, face-covering, pulling-feet-up-onto-the-sofa kind of way.