Tuesday, April 30, 2019

I have pneumonia.

I had to postpone my card activity. I had most of it ready, too, but it had to be postponed because I ended up at the ER on Monday night of last week.

Thankfully, I am improving. I had a follow up visit with my doctor yesterday, and he is happy with my progress. Hopefully I'll be back to posting soon as long as I can muster the energy to actually make anything. Pneumonia is a 6 to 8 week recovery, but I should be doing a lot better in a week. I'm certainly better than a week ago.

Saturday, April 13, 2019

Dealing with Scraps

When I finish a card or a scrapbook page, I always have scraps left over. I tend to throw them into an Iris bin. The problem is that my one Iris bin of scraps has turned into multiple bins. It was just easier to start with a new sheet of card stock and patterned paper than to go to the bins of scraps and dig through them.

I ended up cutting the card stock scraps into photo mats that are 4.25x6.25, card fronts that fit a 4.25x5.5 card, and card fronts that fit the same sized card but with a slight margin of the card exposed. I organized them by color. The scraps that were smaller were also organized by color and fit into quart sized bags. They can be used for die cuts for card making or scrapbooking.

I had a 5 inch tall stack of photo mats, and about the same sized stack of card fronts. However, some of those photo mats and card fronts were cut prior to our move. I added them all together. Hopefully now I will actually go to those first.

I still have to deal with the patterned paper scraps.

It should be a lot easier to use my scraps now. I hope it will speed up both card making and scrapbooking.

Here is a card that I made entirely from my scraps, except for the card base:


It was made prior to my cutting and organizing my scraps, and it was hard to find papers and card stock that went well together. I had pulled together several card kits two or three months ago from my scraps, but I had pulled the easiest and most obvious. Finding papers and card stock that coordinated was much harder after that, which surprised me. That more recent exercise in using leftovers is what actually gave me the incentive to finally deal with my scraps to make them easier to use. There is enough good material among them that I just can't bring myself to toss the scraps. Having seen how many card bases and photo mats I now have, I am glad that I didn't just through all the scraps away.

April Card Making Activity

I had seen a 3D basket weave embossing folder used for some cards on Pinterest. It turned out to be a Stampin' Up product, so I placed an order for it and a few other things.

I cut some card bases from kraft cardstock and embossed them with the basket weave folder. Embossing may not be the trendiest, but I love the look, especially for this card. I added some pansies that I made with the Heartfelt Creations Cheery Pansy stamp and die (from their Burst of Spring collection). I tried various ways of coloring the pansies, but my Copic markers gave the nicest results. The banner *might* be from a Karen Burniston die, but I'm not sure. I used a stamp from a super old clear stamp set.  The stamp was not the same shape as the banner, so I had to use a rather convoluted process to get it to stamp perfectly several times on several banners. It was a bit of a pain, but it worked.

I also found a cute picnic basket card among my Silhouette Design Store cutting files, used the embossing folder on it, and also used a stamp that I found awhile back either at a craft store or Tuesday Morning. The stamp came on a wood block, but like all my other wood mounted stamps, I had removed it, then painted Aleene's Tack-It-Over-and-Over on the back of it. The ants were originally right under the picnic phrase, but I took some scissors and carefully separated the ants from the phrase to make two stamps from it. I embossed the envelope flap with the basket weave, and stamped just the ants on the front of the envelope. The "lid" of the picnic basket is attached to the card that pulls out from the basket, as shown in the bottom photo.

They were both simple and relatively easy cards, and I am happy with how they turned out.


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