Stamps, Paper, Scissors

Rain, rain, go away...I've got a couple tips today

Well, I've been waiting all morning for this rain to go away so I can go to Target. My printer is almost out of yellow ink, I'm totally out of chocolate and..and...what other reason did I have to go? Can't think of it now! Maybe I should just stay home, LOL!

But with the rain continuing to come down and all my packages for stamps I've sold waiting on the porch for the mail man to pick them up, I've got all my ducks in a row (and they are swimming today!) On Saturday, the chick that is subbing for our usual guy LEFT MY PACKAGES HERE!!! That, after I had to chase her down on Friday because she didn't take the packages I had then and she assured me that she was going to come back for them because she couldn't carry them with her. So on Saturday, I just assumed she would come back and get the packages after she'd come and gone and she never did. Humph! So I scheduled a pick up...if you got a notice that your stamps shipped on Saturday, they didn't. And I didn't realize it until after the post office closed. I hope our usual guy is back on the route today...he is soooo much better! So the packages that would have gone out on Saturday will be going out today.

ANYWAY, with nothing else to do except clean, I naturally headed down to the stamp room to avoid that horrible fate. And already I have created something so splendiforous, so spectacularly wonderful that I couldn't wait until tomorrow to show you, but am posting TWICE in one day!

As a lot of you know, I'm nuts for punches and have a whole WALL of them behind my stamping desk. I just love coming up with new ideas for using them. I was trying to be frugal the other day and punch something out of a piece of cardstock that had already been punched using the scallop circle punch and discovered something really, really neat:

Ingredients: Stamps - Stem Sayings, Short & Sweet, Canvas; Paper - Wild Wasabi, Purely Pomegranate,  More Mustard, Tempting Turquoise, Basic Black; Ink - Whisper White, Basic Black, Wild Wasabi; Other - Scallop Circle Punch, Snow Blossom Punch, Photo Corner Punch, Small & Large Oval punches, gold brads, More Mustard grosgrain, black gingham ribbon, Basic Black Marker.

What are those flowers, you say?

You take the snow blossom punch and punch out a hole. Take the cardstock with the snow blossom hole in it and line your scallop circle punch up so that the hole is right in the center of the window on the bottom of the punch and punch.

Then I took these flowers, put packing tape on the back and sprinkled glitter over the packing tape. I adhered a button to the center of my glittery flower and used a dimensional right behind the button to attach it to the card.

Aren't they STINKIN' CUTE?!?!? Just a little bit of outlining with a black marker makes them very cute, or you could add some sponging to the edges to help them pop.

Now for the other tip...this card is 5 inches square. What is it about the base on this card that looks impossible, hmmmm?

Can't guess? Well, how wide is the Canvas background? It's 4.5 inches wide! So how did I stamp the whole card base with the Canvas stamp if it isn't wide enough?

Well, what I did was turn the stamp so that the longest part went across the width of the card and stamped so that the edge of the stamp stopped right where I intended to tie my ribbon. Then I stamped again to cover the bottom of the card, overlapping the previous stamping slightly. So when I covered that with ribbon, you can't tell that I didn't have a stamp big enough to cover the whole thing! Neat, huh?

Now, that's definitely worth some really good chocolate!

A few cards and more punch tricks....

I think I'm getting punchy....

I really love to find new uses for punches. And I've come up with a lot of them and found more of them when looking around at other people's work. Here's a few old and new ones:

I'm trying to alter the way I post pictures since some of you have had problems with the way the text gets broken up by the pictures...this better?

Yeah, I'm addicted to donut cards. What can I say...I love, love, love them. With this card, I used my punch trick on the focal image, the mat and the cardbase. And I love Flannel Plaid...I can't stop using it!!!! I had this card in my mind's eye and it turned out almost exactly as I had planned.

Trick #1: For those of you who don't have the slit punch, you can fake it...look where the ribbon is tied. Instead of using the slit punch on the mat, I cut a little circular notch with the 1/2" circle punch. Looks almost the same? It has a lot less bulk and you don't have to worry about getting the slit in the right place on your mat.

I was trying to come up with a swap for the three people at our group meeting that already got the Joy donut card from the Splitcoast dinner at the Lansing Regionals...I made this and this was not it, but I like it.

Here is my second attempt for those three ladies. The color combo is from the new In Color color combination sheet that SU! put up for us on the demo site...I've been using that almost all the time lately. And the sad thing is I ran out of time to make more of these, so I ended up grabbing the extra Snowflake Spot Versamark resist cards I had made at my last class...don't think they were too dissappointed, though this card in my sample box got lots of attention!

Trick #2: This isn't original to me, as I have seen it done many times, but your Spring Bouquet punch makes a very nice wreath when punched in green and layered around in a circle, doesn't it?

Trick #3: I came up with this; haven't seen anybody else do it, so I claim it! I used the slit punch to make the holes for my ribbon. As a result, as you can see, is an almost invisible way of putting ribbon on your card. It adds practically no bulk when used with organdy ribbons and if you tie the bow wide enough you can't even tell where the ribbon is coming from.

Well, I have a class on Monday and have made NO cards as of yet...so I better get busy!