random.on purpose.

Becoming...

So, I went all crazy today and actually MADE A CARD!  Yes, I did!  Than I got even crazier and here I am posting it on a blog that was headed for shutdown (still probably is - jury's still out)!  Here it is:

It's a graduation card for one of my nieces.  Inside it says, "So proud of the woman you are becoming".  It's also for today's Featured Stamper challenge over on Splitcoast Stampers.  Magouille has a very full, very beautiful gallery.  I chose this card to inspire mine:

I liked the text background, dress and color palette and wanted to incorporate those elements into my card.  As you may remember, I don't really "do" techniques (like the stenciling and sponging and all of those things that Magouille is obviously very comfortable with), so my card is mostly not that...

I did do some stippling around the edges of the card, but mostly I printed the beautiful image (Skirt of Flowers from A Day for Daisies) onto some Prima paper and added some soft color with chalk (technically, it's eye shadow - potato/potato...).  I used my Perfect Layers tools to cut some mats and I was done.  Card measures 5" square.

Know what?  I had so much fun MAKING something instead of just purging/organizing/indexing/blah blah blah, that I might stay crazy enough to do it again!  Further bulletins as events warrant...

If anyone's still hanging around, thanks for stopping by and have a great week!

 

A Small Re-gear

Turns out I don't have to delete the blog completely to go to a free platform - just have some limitations (like the theme, for example).  I will continue to ignore this blog for the time being, including leaving everything that's already here intact - just don't expect anything new in the near future!  Thanks for your support to date, joy on your journey, and I'll let you know if things change and I come back around...

Heads Up!

Just a quick fly-by to alert anyone who may still be hanging around waiting for me to post something of worth or value:  If there is any information or a tutorial or anything that you may want to reference in the future, I would advise doing a cut-and-paste dealie-o or a printout or something, as I will be taking the blog down by mid-May.  It has run its course, I don't have the time or inclination to attend to it (no kidding, right?) and, even though it's not much money, Typepad is still a pay-to-play platform for a blog and I don't need to pay for something I'm not using.  If I decide to transfer over to Blogger and leave things parked there, I will let you know, but I'm not sure how ambitious I am about that, either.  Anyway - there's that!  Thanks to any/all who have visited, and joy on your journey!

Washi Wrangling

Back before Christmas I made some kits for my granddaughters that required a variety of washi tape, so I ended up with a collection.  Like everything else in my crafty space, it needs a home that will keep it available and organized but not make me cranky.  My solution is simple, cheap and effective (hooray - three out of three!):

What you are looking at is the curtain rod that I installed to temporarily hold the Bygel cups onto the pegboard, and an additional curtain rod installed above it.  I need one more for the seasonal tapes...

I'm working on another project to resolve another aspect of my craft storage that's making me VERY cranky, so I'll share that when I'm done, as well.  Have a great weekend, and thanks for stopping by!

Surrender vs. Abdication

Lately I have been involved in  discussions regarding self will and asserting it - or not.  The contention is that our will is selfish and not a reliable guide, so surrendering to a higher power is the answer.

That's good as far as it goes, but here's the rub:  if you are asking said higher power for guidance, then you need to be open to and aware of the various ways that this guidance shows up.  Intuition - literally "taught from within" - is, I believe, one of those ways.  If we confuse intuition with self will - with letting the Ego take over - then we risk denying ourselves a very vital tool.

Thinking that we have to surrender our will and trust that things will "go the way they're supposed to", that however things play out is "God's will" or whatever, without our very active - even proactive - participation, is an abdication of responsibility.

Did your higher power not give you tools that you are expected to use?  Do you not have a "still, small voice" and a mind capable of processing the options available, guided by that?

Certainly we need to let go of attachments to outcomes - not let ourselves get thrown off course because it doesn't look like we expected it to - but throwing our hands in the air is exactly the same thing as throwing in the towel.

GPS is helpful in directing your route, but it only works when you're in motion, which means that you have to be an active participant in the process...

Cake or Death?

I know - weird title for a blog post.  I'll get to the reason in a minute...  First, here's the card I made for one of my daughters for her birthday:

Stamps used were Stampingbella's Petunia Thinks She's a Prezzie and The Project Bin Born Yesterday.   I colored the sweet image with my Spectrum Noir markers.  I used my WRMK Corner Chomper to round the corners of the mats and a Marvy Uchida dimple corner punch on the main panel.  The scalloped border is a Fiskars punch.  Papers are S.E.I. Happy Day patterned papers,  Stampin'Up! Watermelon Wonder cardstock, and Recollections Cool Waters and white cardstocks.  I used Stampin'Up!'s Petals-a-plenty embossing folder on the white background panel.  I didn't think of the flower brads until after the card was already put together, so I snipped the "legs" off of them and stuck them on with glue dots.

If you have seen Eddie Izzard's Dress to Kill video, then the inside of the card (and the title of this post) make sense, otherwise, I've included the pertinent clip below for your viewing pleasure:

Same papers as listed above, but this stamp is from The Project Bin's Bazinga! set.  The daughter that this is for is a very big Eddie Izzard fan, so...

Here's the video clip (it's part of a series and the next one will autoplay, so be aware of that and just click the pause button if you don't want to see the others):

And a Lego version, just for fun...

Fun extra tidbit:  The design of this card was from this week's sketch challenge on Splitcoast, and has been listed several times in the "Favorites" thread for this week...

And that's it for now!  Thanks for stopping by, and have a FABULOUS week!

Half-baked project finished!

So, you may remember this painting from quite awhile back (two years ago, as a matter of fact):

When I bought the canvases for that project, they came in a pack of two and I bought two packs.  Since I only used three for the above painting, I had another blank canvas to play with.  I used only the blues and painted a background, fully intending to use Tim Holtz's Crazy Birds in some configuration on it.  I played around with various ideas and penciled them on large scrap papers and laid them on the canvas and NOTHING was working!  That canvas has been sitting unloved and unfinished in the guest room closet this whole time...

Recently, one of the girls on Splitcoast (bjeans) posted a thread about an item that she saw at Ikea.  It was this:

That sparked an idea immediately for how to finish the canvas with the Crazy Birds!  I wasn't able to execute the plan for a couple of weeks after getting the inspiration, but I finally managed it:

I obviously do not have anywhere near as many birds as the inspiration piece (not as many rows of twine and clothespins, either), but this is also smaller and it makes me happy just as it is!  I had originally intended to make the canvas a piece to go on the blank wall above the toilet in my guest bath, but I've decided that it needs to live in the guest bedroom/craft room instead.  It's going above the small desk where I sit to color and fussy cut...

I stamped the birds on watercolor paper, painted them with distress inks (Wild Honey, Fired Brick, Peeled Paint, Mowed Lawn, Salty Ocean and Dusty Concord), then cut them out with the coordinating dies (bless Tim forever for creating those - these suckers are really difficult to fussy cut), then used Mod Podge to adhere them to the canvas and top-coat them.  The twine is stapled to the inside edge of the canvas frame on the back, and I already had the tiny clothespins (available at most craft stores and Walmart).

And that's the rest of the story!  Thanks for stopping by, and have a great week!

 

 

And so, we begin again...

Now that I've got my room back in order and all of my stamps inventoried and tucked properly into the system, I can get back to creating, right?  I actually made a card a couple of weeks ago, but had to wait until it got to its intended recipient before I could post it here:

It was a two-fer - I wanted to join the "cuddly, snuggly" challenge on Splitcoast and I owed Sherry a card (for Christmas - doh!), so this is what I made.  Since Christmas was long past, I decided a general "I'm so sorry that you live in the frigid Northeast, but I hope you stay cozy" kind of card was in order.  This cutie is from Stampingbella:  The Penguin and the Marshmallow, and he's colored with Spectrum Noir and Bic MarkIt markers.  The papers are from Basic Grey's Eskimo Kisses, and the die is C.C. Designs.  Sentiment is from Unity's October 2016 Kit of the Month Holiday Hugs.

More creativity in the near future, I'm hoping!  I've got a project half-baked that I'll probably finish up in the next couple of days (it's not a card), so there's that...  Meanwhile, stay warm and thanks for stopping by!

Revamp, renew

As most of us are at this time of year, I'm re-thinking some of my organization and making necessary tweaks.  I came up with an idea to solve two problems: 1) I bought some Ikea Bygel cups to hang on the side of my Raskog cart, but didn't like them there, and 2) I still wanted to use them.  Here's my solution:

The entire back of my workbench (from Harbor Freight, seen HERE) is pegboard.  I went to Walmart and bought a cheap curtain rod and these screws and nuts and washers:

Serendipitous occurrence:  the holes in the pegboard are exactly the same distance apart as the holes in the mounting brackets for the curtain rod!  I stuck the screw through the bracket and the hole in the pegboard, stuck a washer on the backside and screwed on the nut:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here it is before I leveled it out:

Since the brackets have some fiddling room, I was able to move the right side up and the left side down a smidge before I hung the cups on.  Here it is again:

The one on the far left has small rulers and Xacto knives and a very small rotary cutter.  Center is glue dots and dimensionals, and far right has adhesives of other types (Quickie Glue pen, small tape runner, E6000, etc.).  I know that I could have screwed the cups directly to the pegboard, but they're up off my worktable for now and I have a future plan for the curtain rod, so there you go!

I've also been revamping my stamp storage, organization and indexing.  I found these at Ikea:

All of my stamps are back on 5 1/2" x 8 1/2" laminated cardstock and in appropriately-sized page protectors.  They were in binders in a previous incarnation of my system, but I re-thought that idea, overhauled to 4" x 6" photo sleeves in small bins, and now I'm back to the larger size but don't want the binders. 

Because there are SO MANY stamps - even though I've purged SO MANY stamps - I needed to have dividers to help me find things.  Being as frugal as I am, I chose to make them from cereal boxes, using my WRMK envelope punch board.  Here's how that went:

1) Cut cardboard to 6 1/2" x 9"

2)Punch notch in top edge: 2 1/4" from left edge for first tab, 2" from each edge for center tab, 2 1/4" from right edge for third tab:

3) Cut from non-tab edge to punched notch(es) to remove excess cardboard:

 

4)  Round all corners:

Repeat for as many dividers as you require.  Here's the finished lineup:

And here they are in action:

My index binders (trading card pages with stamped images) have the same categories and dividers as the stamps themselves:

I use a P-Touch label maker for all of my labels, in case you care...  Those are the two main tweaks to the system over here!  There are other, smaller ones, but nothing share-worthy...  I hope some of this was helpful for you!  Happy Hump Day, and enjoy the rest of your week!  Thanks, as always, for stopping by!

 

 

 

 

 

Thoughts on beginning again...

Yesterday was kind of a write-off day.  I won't say "wasted", because down time can be a good thing, too, but essentially it was a lot of laying around.  There were things that I had wanted to do but I wasn't up to it physically or mentally.  There's always tomorrow, right?

Except - one day there won't be...  Life can change in an instant and, even if it's not death that alters it, events can transpire that make "tomorrow" so unlike your previous tomorrows, that it's an entirely different existence.

Which makes a VERY good case for doing what matters NOW, in the moment, while you can.  As I ease into this new year I am evaluating what matters most, and attempting to organize my life around that.

I had an idea along about Thanksgiving that I would spend Christmas week doing some soul-searching and prioritizing and "life mapping", but that did not happen.  Some of what I did instead was worthwhile, some was pure procrastination, plain and simple.

What is it about our "ruts" that makes us think that we're comfortable there?  What are we fearful of when setting out to change - a habit, a thought pattern, a schedule, or a life?  I'm theorizing that if we could break down the fears to their least common denominator they would fade away, because they're truly baseless and inconsequential.

One of the things that I know holds me back is the head games that I play with myself.  Calendars and timelines that are not mine, but possibly the "normal, usual" ones accepted by the society that I live in have a way of taking precedence over my own rhythms and reasons.

This year I want to honor my own drummer.  What truly makes my heart beat faster, wilder?  What makes it skip a beat?  Those are the things that I want to pursue!

The mundane "slog" that just thumps out an existence is NOT where I want to spend my time!  Guilt over missing a deadline (like January 1 for the "resolutions") will be a thing of my past, as well...

I can take my time and assess things as I go about my days:  what's working?  what isn't?  what will improve the task, the mood, the meal, the interaction and so, ultimately, the Life?  I can take notes as I notice things and use them in my morning writing sessions to do the real work of aligning my daily actions with my core beliefs.

"The unexamined life is not worth living" - or something like that...  Sounds harsh and cataclysmic, but seeds of truth and a prompt for better...

"What you focus on expands" is more hopeful (and helpful).  Learning where to put that focus is the key to being more productive, more engaged, and much, much happier.

As I am assessing and prioritizing and all the rest of it, there are two definites that I want to pay attention to:  a morning routine and a before-bed routine.  I feel that book-ending my days in ways that are meaningful to me will go a long way in creating a space between the two that is more likely to be filled with meaningful things, as well.

So - that's my Grand Plan for 2017!  Further bulletins as events warrant...  May your New Year be filled with all the things that matter most to YOU!

Love and light ~ Sue