While I haven’t managed an art journal page every week the way I’d planned, I haven’t completely forgotten about the project, either. The “Anything But Cardstock” challenge this month seemed like a great reason to pull the journal out and create something!
While my art journal layouts do not routinely use cardstock to begin with, in the spirit of the challenge, I avoided all paper other than what was already in the journal. My major supply, then, were wet wipes that I’d used to clean up from previous stamping projects and then let dry. They end up being this stretchable, tearable, art-able fabric that can be very fun to play with.
Make sure you head over to Imagine’s blog to see how I “painted” with these leftovers and maybe you won’t look at trash the same way again!
I don’t always look forward to summer, but when I do, it’s because there’s good food and fun to be had.
We’ve been working out in the yard a bit lately–planting flowers and clearing the way for some bigger projects to come (driveway! fence! deck!). And at the end of a day outside, there’s little that’s as refreshing as a tall glass of ice-cold lemonade.
When you can’t share a glass in person, send a cute card like this one, complete with a liquid-looking inside to your lemonade pitcher.
The liquidy center was inspired by those baby bottle toys we had as kids–the ones where the liquid looked like it disappeared as you tipped it up?–and it gave me the opportunity to dig out my woodburning tool to combine with the diecuts to make it work. You can do the same, most like, with a Fuse tool or similar.
The video play-by-play and the full supply list can be found over on the Imagine blog.
I’ve actually had a few of those, lately, thanks to making time for myself and various projects I want to accomplish. But the afternoon I’m talking about, today, is the one that happened about a week ago when I got into the Blissful card kit from Simon Says Stamp and made a good stack of cards from this gorgeous kit!
To see and hear how these cards came together, check out the video, below, or head over to my YouTube channel:
Like most of the Simon Says Stamp kits, this one has sold out, and the stamp set it’s built around is out of stock at the moment, too (though you can sign up for the waiting list to be notified when it’s available again). Still, a supply list is the thing to do for a post like this, so here you go! (the following list may contain some affiliate links)
SSS Blissful Card Kit (out of stock) which included:
While I generally enjoy crafting with the Simon Says Stamp kits, my favorite part of this kit (and all the kits so far) were the Daniel Smith watercolors. They were an absolute dream to work with and I have added some more of the dot sheets (like the one linked above) to my shopping list. While there were only 4 colors included on the dot sheet, I was able to paint an entire sheet of stamped images and get a good number of color variations by mixing tiny bits of those little dots.
I can’t tell you how often I’ve set out to make a single-layer card only to end up trimming it down to make it into a panel and matting it onto something else before being happy with it. It’s been a lot, of that I’m sure, and it’s pretty dog-gone frustrating!
I am happy to report, however, that I have broken this unlucky streak and, really, once I realized how I managed it, I’m kinda kicking myself for not trying this before.
What it all boiled down to were three basic rules of design and composition:
Repetition (the same stamped shapes repeated throughout the image)
Limited color palette (dark, medium, and light of the same color family–in this case tangerine/orange)
Balance of positive and negative space (leaving one area blank to offset the busyness of another)
The diagonal line I created with the flowers helped too, and by playing with the mix of color and texture within the repetitive shape I kept the card interesting.
You can see exactly how this card came about–including video!–over on the Imagine blog today!
This weekend I spent a little over two hours creating a batch of cards. Not for a deadline or project or because I needed to send one out the next day, just because.
Because I had a cute kit (Simon Says Stamp, February 2017) that I hadn’t used yet. And because Donut Day (last Friday) reminded me I had it. And sometimes it feels good to craft for no other reason than to do it.
Of course, since I’m me and I’d decided to go ahead and use the kit anyway, I figured I’d go ahead and film it and see what came of it.
The what being a 20 minute video of me rambling a bit, but it’s done and uploaded and I think it’s pretty cool. Again, it was nice to have the time and space to put the cards together and then, by some stroke of magic, get it edited, voiced-over (voice-overed?), and exported all in the same day.
The last video I tried to export, that being the CSI Scrap With Me, took 2 days, multiple restarts, a graphics driver upgrade, and a software upgrade, and a few more hoops just to get the blasted thing to export, much less anything else. This time, however, things went more smoothly and I have to say, major kudos to Premiere Pro for updating it’s title tool (finally!).
Last week (and the week before) was a bad tech week for me, in general. Work computers were wonky, my home laptop was threatening to fail (I was seriously thinking about replacing it during the holiday sales weekend), and then I was extra clumsy Wednesday morning and dropped my phone. Twice.
Apparently it’s better to drop a cellphone where it bounces of a corner instead of landing flat (face up or face down doesn’t matter, and it’s not like we choose to drop our expensive handheld devices one way or another, of course). Because when you drop it flat, the chances of some very important pieces detaching increases astronomically.
First the screen took on this sickly greenish tinge. Then I noticed the touch-screen (which is 99% of the function of a smartphone) wasn’t responding. I figured I was doomed no matter what, so I smacked the phone against my palm and the color corrected. Yay! But the touch screen still wasn’t responding.
Or, I should say, it wasn’t responding how I needed it to. It was doing it’s little zzzt! vibration, like it was registering a command (I have my phone on silent and work and, since I get so few calls anyway, tend to forget and leave it that way at home for days–ahem, weeks–at a time) but it wasn’t getting past the lock screen.
So I did the logical thing: I took out the battery to do a hard reset. After a few moments I gave the phone back it’s battery and then nothing. Absolutely nothing.
I can vividly remember a time before cell phones and it wasn’t even all that bad. Even a time before smart phones. Again, not that bad. But my word, driving to work without a cell phone? That sucked. I couldn’t listen to my podcasts or music (thank goodness for some CDs I had in my car, saving me from drive-time djs). I couldn’t search for the nearest Verizon store. And I couldn’t see if maybe Costco might have better prices on phones. It was pretty horrible, she says from her perch of technological privilege.
It was, however, perhaps the quickest I’ve ever been in and out of a Verizon store: 30 minutes for a new phone and various accessories. Of course I was a year early for an upgrade, but Todd’s contract was up in about 4 months so I was able to buy out the rest of his and then sub in a new phone without drastically changing our bill. And based on my rash of bad phone luck, I did not leave without a case and a screen protector (which I had the sales rep install for me, just in case) and within two days I’d purchased a pop-socket, because the new phone is larger than my old one, and having something slightly more secure to hold onto makes incredible sense.
That’s what I’ve been up to, more or less. What about you?
