Memorial Day
This weekend I’ve been focusing on making cards for Operation Write Home, a very worthy activity. I’m glad I could participate in an activity like this as my first foray back into crafting after a long dry spell while I had houseguests.
OWH has been having a blog hop this weekend, CLICK HERE to see all the fantastic cards people have made with the various sketches.
I’m glad Club Scrap is officially participating in this effort, too.
Here I started off with using this month’s Club Stamp kit for making these cards for service members to write home to their loved ones…
Using the Club Stamp kit for May, Wildflowers.
I’m thinking of having a crop at my house very soon for people to help making cards for OWH. (It will be a GREAT way to help make a dent in my Club Scrap stash, too!) Let me know if you’re interested in attending…
See Operation Write Home for more inspiration…
And here, Tricia Morris of Club Scrap demonstrates using “Assembly Line” techniques to make a trio of cards using one of the OWH many card sketches: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sofRS0fyQHA
Finally, my heartfelt thanks go out today for the sacrifices made by our brave heroes in all arenas, that allowed our country to flourish. My freedom is not free…
My prize arrived…
Yay, the prize I won arrived yesterday, and I assembled it very quickly… I won it by just entering a prize drawing at the Best Craft Organizer booth at the Creating Keepsakes Convention in Mesa on April 14th. Normally I don’t enter contests like that any more, because I’m just not interested in the product, or know I won’t use it. But this was one of those booths where I drool over the organizing storage possibilities they have, so I would definitely be interested in winning a free one. And it happened! They phoned me last week to say they had drawn my name! Now I can’t say I’ve never won anything any more…
This is the cabinet I won… a $172 value!
Okay, another new start! LOL
Hmm, how many times should I re-start before I just give up??? Well, one more try.
I think this time, it’s just been easier to use Facebook to keep folks updated; at least it’s easier to upload photos there. Anyway, I’ll try one more time.
Also I’ve been busy for the past almost-year with house guests that I hadn’t been used to before; less time to be free to just be crafty and/or post anything!
This time I may just not wait till I have something “crafty” to show, but chronicle other things as well. We shall see.
To start with, here are some photos I took while experimenting watching the annular eclipse of the sun that happened Sunday evening. I had never tried the pinhole-in-a-paper-plate trick before, and when it worked, I was very excited! Always been a fan of celestial events (as well as extreme weather events…)
Here’s the setup
Here is the crescent-shaped sun showing through the hole.
Awesome, right? I was quite proud of myself. That I tried it out, first of all, and secondly that my camera actually could take a passable photo of the result.
Restart: My latest project
Wow, three quarters of the year has passed! Sorry “life” gets in the way of posting… anyway, on to new things…
The August Club Stamp kit’s magazine had a great idea for making your own mosaic tile stamp, which I was itching to try. I’d just seen two weeks prior a video on YouTube about it, and forgot to bookmark it to come back to. When it showed up in the Scrap Rap, I knew it was time to try.
I spent many hours at a crop last weekend cutting up the leftover scraps from the unmounted rubber sheets I’d gotten in my latest pizza box into very small-size “tile” pieces, and mounting them directly on a big unused wooden block.
About mid-way through it, I thought I’d better test it in case it didn’t work. Sure enough, the rubber pieces were of varying thicknesses, and without cushioning under them, the experiment failed miserably. Even putting a lot of cusioning underneath the paper I was stamping on didn’t help at all.
I’d spent all day getting that far, and know I didn’t have anything I could use for cushioning with me at the crop, so I had to abandon the project at that point.
The following day at home I found some sheets of fun foam in my newly cleared out craft room, and knew they would be perfect to use for the cushioning. I cut two thicknesses, mounted them on the block, and then set out adhering a second set of scraps to them. This time it took several short sessions over the span of the week to finally finish it…
Second try at the stamp
Let me say at this point that next time I try it, I’ll go about it differently, to save a lot of time: this time I had put the semi-tacky adhesive (Mount-It) on the back of the whole sheet of rubber images, and then covered it when dry with a sheet of wax paper before cutting out the images I would save; that’s my normal way of preparing unmounted images for use. When it was time to cut up the scraps into little tile pieces, each of them of course had the wax paper covering on the back. It was quite time-consuming to remove every little piece of wax paper on the back of every little piece of rubber scrap! So next time, I’ll use the “sticky box” method of putting the adhesive on the back of the pre-trimmed images, leaving the scraps adhesive-free. When it’s time to make the stamp, I’ll mount the fun foam pads to whatever I’m using for a block, and spread the Mount-It adhesive all over the foam sheet–that way adhering the little pieces will go much faster!
Stamp focal images
Okay. With the stamp complete, now I turned toward the image I was going to use it on. I stamped some images from the Versailles collection on some plain generic white cardstock.
Then I covered the mosaic tile stamp with Versamark ink, and stamped that on top of the image.
Overstamp and emboss
Then I used clear embossing powder to sprinkle on top, and heat embossed it.
After it was set, then I used the Club Scrap Sandstone ink, direct-to-paper, to rub over the whole piece, getting it into the grout cracks inbetween the tiles.
Then wiped off excess ink sitting on top of the glossy tiles to brighten them back up.
Below is the final card…
(The glossiness of the tiles doesn’t show in this photo because the angle of the camera avoided the glare.)
Final card
Looking forward to using the stamp in a few different ways…
Happy New Year!
Wow, the new year crept up on me! I was going to at least fill in the past few months with some catch-up posts, but didn’t have a chance before the calendar ticked up one more year… sigh…
Oh well, I’ll still do that–there were a few crops and projects I wanted to show before I move on very far — BUT– at least for today, New Year’s Day, I wanted to get one post done and out of the way.
I decided to re-inaugurate my “Project 365″ for 2011, and spent a part of the day recording my first video blog post for it. (There’s a link to it at the right of the text menu above, so you can move back and forth anytime you wish. But just for today, I wanted to post the following video in both of them… this one has a crafty tip at the end anyway!)
Enjoy — and – HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Fun fest at Peggy’s annual fall crop
Thursday Therapy annual fall crop at Peggy's
- Sharon wins!
Last weekend crop…
Ooops, getting behind here… sorry I neglected to post about what a fun time we had at my house when Diana and Paula came over for a day of general project-making (Oct. 10) … I’m happy Diana had just made it back to the Valley to settle in for the winter season… Thanks to both of you for making my Sunday a crafty one!
Paula, Diana & me
