Whirlpool of Imagination

New Nest

Blech - rain, rain and more cold rain. This is a rude awakening after that glorious weather last week.

But you can tell it's spring because the birdies have been checking out the birdhouses in our yard - it's really cool to watch them check things out and then start to bring bits and pieces into the nest. And in light of our potentially new tenants in what we affectionately call our "condos", I have the following new home card to show you today.

The birdhouse digi image is from Inktegrity. I printed it off and colored it with copic and prismacolor markers.

copic: E37     prismacolor: leaf green, light olive green, cocoa bean

The sentiment stamps is from There She Goes and is stamped with Memento cottage ivy ink. 

And that's all I've got for today. The rain kept me up most of last night so I'm crawling into bed nice and early tonight (even if it is an American Idol night!)

Have a great one!

Card Storage

One of the biggest challenges of this hobby/career is storing everything that goes with it. And that includes the finished product. I have debated about the best way to store my master card designs. I wanted to come up with something that kept them in one place, could accomodate all sizes/shapes and could look pretty. I think I've finally come up with a solution. Have you been to the There She Goes website yet? Not only do they sell very good quality acrylic stamps, they now also have a very neat card storage solution.

This is what their card bins look like when put together. I ordered a set of three of these when they were first offered. The bins come to you flat but they are very easy to construct. In fact, everything is just one piece - it's a matter of folding up the sides. Believe me, I am challenged when trying to put things together and this was easy as pie, even for me.

  Before I actually put this together, I decided on what I would use this one for (winter holiday cards) and chose paper to go with that theme. Pretend I'm just starting and you don't see the paper yet. I didn't take pictures as I went along.

I wanted to match the inside of the bin with the paper. While I liked the white layers, I wanted to cover the brown. By using plain old acylic paint I painted the inside just to jazz things up a bit. I needed three layers in the end to coat the brown the way I wanted to. My goal was to make the insides look nice when the cards are in the bin.

And here is the finaly product with some paper and a bit of ribbon and with sample cards in it. I have various sizes and shapes of cards held within this box and they all fit nicely. And these are roomy. I will be able to fit in lots more cards before it fills up.

I recently had someone place an order with me and what a pleasure it was to present this piece to them for them to make a selection. In the past, I'd just pile a bunch of cards in a bag and pull them out when needed. Now I can offer a piece that looks as put together as the cards themselves.

I'm in the midst of decorating the other two I have and will show them off when they are done. I would definitely recommend this item (and this company) if you are looking for a new card storage system. The quality is fantastic and the customer service is exceptional.

The Infamous Drippy Goo

The science of marketing.....it's so interesting to see what tool or gadget is a must have and what is a must not have. Have you read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell? It's a really interesting book about this very topic. Whether it is an idea, a behavior or, in this case, a product, this book talks about how they spread. How they become epidemics, in Gladwell's words. It's a cool read - I recommend it if you get the chance. This leads me to the drippy goo punch by Martha Stewart Crafts. Who knew that they would become a coveted item this Halloween season? I was lucky - I picked one up about a month ago in a rare trip to Michaels. I figured after buying it, I'd better put it to some use (or sell it on ebay if I want to make a bundle!)

  I was trying to make some October notecards for myself. I had one idea that really wasn't working so I completely scrapped it and grabbed my drippy goo punch instead.

I punched the drippy goo in both green and purple and added stickles along the edges of both. Once attached to the white layer, I stamped a pumpkin from the Halloween set from There She Goes in orange ink from Stampin' Up. I used the xyron to adhere the goo which made quick and easy work of these.

Here's the set of notecards I worked on today. All in all, not counting the tons of time I spent on the idea that DIDN'T work, these took no time at all.

Columbus Day went well here. There was a minor skirmish this evening but overall, the day off from school was a mostly relaxing event. (Those do happen sometimes!). Have a great night!

Gentle Thoughts

This week I spent some time going through my card inventories. I was running low of some designs so I did a bit of repeat work. Some themes also needed some more designs so that is what today's card is all about. One category that I don't have a lot of designs for is sympathy cards. I have enough stamps that say "with sympathy" but I don't have many more that contain alternate wording for sympathy cards. When I saw the sympathy set from There She Goes, I decided that I must buy it.

The bird silhouette is stamped with a palette noir ink pad first and second generation, although the picture is not showing the lighter grey layer well. Besides the simple stamping, I used one of my newer cuttlebug folders and just layered.

Today we are staying pretty close to home. Mo's knee went out on him this morning she's taking it easy for himself today. Meg has to cheer so I'm off for that but hopefully later I can come home and create. Have a great day!

Silhouette Sympathy

Are you surprised to see that I'm using silhouette stamps again? I'm telling you ~ I don't think I can use anything else at the moment. That's all my brain wants to create with!

What's fun today is that this is a new stamp company that I'm trying out because you know my motto.....you can never have enough stamps!  (most especially if they are silhouettes or flowers and extra points if they are both).

On a round of blog hopping one day, I discovered There She Goes stamps. I had missed the initial preorder period and had to wait for the stamps to get onto the website before I could try these little guys out. These are good quality acrylic stamps. They were not flimsy as some acrylics are and stamped well pretty much right from the start.

Both the floral silhouette and sentiment are from the same set. I stamped the flowers with starry night palette ink (same with the sentiment), both first and second generation. Sometimes acrylic stamps stamp out almost completely on the first generation so that you can't do a second generation with them. I found no problem doing that with these. The trick I have found with pretty much all acrylics (well, the high quality) is when you are stamping the image for the first time, always stamp it on a piece of scrap paper, some of which I keep right at my stamping table. This is almost like a warm up for the stamp. It seems to need to have ink on it and then after that, all subsequent images stamp just fine.

The rest of the card is pretty obvious. It is done in my usual clean and simple style.

I am really pleased with these stamps. I would recommend them without any hesitation. And if you check out the website, you'll notice there are ways to acrue "points" for free items - something I am all for. I am looking forward to see what other fun sets Jessica comes up with - I am pretty positive that I will be a repeat customer!