Lazy.

I'll chalk this card up to being lazy. I hate it, it's boring, it's lame, it's ugly, it's not worthy of posting. But here I am, posting it. I took a piece of patterned paper, Threw it on over a label made from a Spellbinders label die with another patterned paper, and used foam tape for a little dimension. I dislike it so much that I’m not even trying to fix it and make it better. I’ve moved on to bigger and better things.

Honestly I don’t know why I’m posting this and I'm annoyed at myself for doing so. I think it's just because I like to be able to look at everything I made, good and bad, so I can see how I’m progressing as a "crafterella", as my husband calls me.

Trial and Error.

*disclaimer: I wrote this entry months and months ago, so when I say "yesterday" and "today", I actually mean like a year ago*

I have to do a lot of trial and error in this crafting adventure lifestyle.

As you know, I'm obsessed with Damask Love.  She did an awesome series, Start Your Stash, a few months ago.  She recommended Market Street Stamps's Candy Stripe stamp.

Here's one of her awesome cards she used with this stamp:

http://www.damasklove.com/start-your-stash-day-5/

Yesterday I purchased said recommended stamp, along with the argyle stamp (I luff argyle!), and I received them today already!

I've been talking to Michelle from Amusingmichelle.com about how to get crisp stamped images.  She says she uses a lot of Stampin Up! inks, so I decided I would use one or two of mine.  I have about 15 ink pads that I inherited from my friend, Kelsi.  I never liked their quality, but I wanted to give them another try since Michelle has great cards, they're a super popular brand, and I know this stamp is high quality. You can tell just by the way it looks and feels on your fingers!

Here's my test sheet: 

I wrote what each color/stamp was as I went, so I knew exactly what to use and what not to use in the future.  I should've done this a long time ago.  But you can pretty easily see that every image is not perfect.  It didn't matter how long I sat there inking the stamp, how evenly I SWORE I pressed down the stamp, whatever. Do you even KNOW how frustrating that is!??!?!?!

I've come to the conclusion that Stampin Up! sucks, "Designer" ink pads suck and apparently don't have the same quality in mind when they call themselves designer, Adironockackirdacki (I totally misspelled that on purpose) sucks, and Staz On takes two paper towels to clean if you ink the entire stamp, and it still sucks.

I've also discovered that three ink pads that I've never once used, which I also inherited from Kelsi, are pretty awesome.  The orange one has nothing on the ink pad:  no company name, no logo, no color name, no type of ink it is, nothing.  The two smaller ink pads are Hero Arts Little Inkers pigment inks, and that's all I know.

Sigh.  I wish Amber (Damask Love) would post her fail cards or tries!  This is discouraging :)

So what are die ink pads used for?

Pigment inks seem to be great

Archival can be great
I already know that Distress Inks aren't for crisp images... they're too ... watery. 

Lights.

This card may be super simple, but I love it.  I may be having a slight problem lately with making my cards TOO simple.  I always say "it's easier to add more, but you can't take off less"... without starting all over, I guess.

I'm still trying to find a perfect way to get the lighting without having to edit, but it's close enough IMO!

I love the felt ribbon and the tiny Christmas lights that I picked up from the doll house section at Hobby Lobby.  So cute!

Ransom.

I remember back in the day when I watched cartoons and when I read Calvin and Hobbes comic books. Calvin wrote a ransom note once to Susie, saying he had her doll and wanted something in return. In an effort to keep himself anonymous, he cut out letters from magazines to form the words on his note.

I used that same principle here and I had a ton of fun with it!

I know it's not the best photo, but I gave it away before I had a chance to take a better picture.

My husband gives me input on nearly everything I make. He's able to tell me instantly if he can see what I intended to accomplish, if something is easy to read, or if just looks... off... in general. This card was one that he definitely helped with.  Without the small print behind the sentiment, even with the "THANKS" raised on foam, it still wasn't immediately easy to read. When I added the small print strip in the middle behind the sentiment, he agreed it's easier to see that it’s a thank you card, not just a random card.

I did a lot of projects like this growing up, to inspiration boards, to collages, to letters to friends. It felt like a blast to the past.

Father's.

I'm trying a new routine that will make me productive and still let me do fun things.

Do one hour of each: (or less than an hour, usually, but the idea is to DO it for a little while)

1. Scrapbook/Project Life/Craft of some sort (for the record, I started Project Life a week ago and I CANNOT GET ENOUGH OF IT. Mom, if you read this, you'll want to talk to me about this. It's like 2084 times easier than scrapbooking and gets it done faster, but you can still be creative with it.)
2. Clean or tidy up or do something productive to make the house moar bettar
3. Post one blog entry, or take photos of previous work that's waiting to be photographed
4. Attempt to get my STUPID silhouette to actually work good
5. Home improvement stuff (painting the mudroom, put things on walls that have been sitting around for 3 years, work on fixing up the pieces of furniture I picked up off the side of the road, etc)

Did you read that?

Adam let me get a silhouette off eBay for $100 OFF!! AHH!

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand it sucks.

It's SUCH a neat idea, and I KNOW I'm doing something terribly wrong, but I cannot, for the life of me, figure it out.  I don't get clean cuts most of the time.  The paper tears, even sometimes on easy cuts.  I've fuddled around with the settings, thickness, speed, blade number, type of paper, etc. SO MANY TIMES I WANT TO THROW THE DANG THING OUT A WINDOW! But I won't do that because we just got new windows. :)  I even purchased a brand new blade, not trusting the "new" blades that came from the eBay seller.

Does anyone have any help for me? 

On to the card I have today... it's a really fun one that I sent my dad for Father's Day!

It's a suit! I loved it the second I saw the free template on Paper Craft's website. 

Because the template was only for the front, and I think it was actually supposed to be adhered to the front of a gift bag, I had to do a little work-around to make it a card.

See my fix? I just made the suit paper a little bigger and wrapped it around a second sheet of card stock. Viola! 

It was super fun and quite easy to make. I love the way it turned out.

Weddings.

I have a few more congratulations/wedding cards.

I'm posting these for my mother who would like me to make a few for her.

I made her a bunch of thank you cards and I think I still haven't posted pictures. Too time consuming!

I got a Silhouette Cameo and I am having SO much fun with it. I'm having a hard time figuring out why only sometimes the blade catches on the paper and rips it and ruins the project. I've made so many adjustments to the speed, thickness, blade, etc. and it still rips sometimes. I may just order a new blade and see if the seller on Ebay just gave me a dull one.

I also collected a bit of the Inkadinkado Stamping Gear and it is AWESOME! I love the effects it makes!

Ok.. on to the cards with just a brief description

I'm in love with quatrefoil, so of course I have a embossing folder. I cut a heart out of the embossed cream card stock and embossed the sentiment on the velum.

This simple card I don't really like. Too bland. The sentiment is a die cut from Tim Holtz, and the embossed swirls on the right is from him as well. And that's it. Bland.

Surprise, surprise! More quatrefoil. The stamp is pretty small considering how large of a card this is, so I had to cover some mistakes, which worked out nice.  ZING! Blush embossing powder used on the quatrefoil stamp and the sentiment. To be able to put the ribbon top to bottom instead of sideways, I punched a teeny hole on the fold to stick the ribbon through and wrap around. 

Easy peasy on this one. I used a script embossing folder, blended some Tim Holtz inks, stamped a sentiment on the banner, layered pretty Martha Stewart butterflies, done and done.

That's all, folks.

Mom, let me know which one(s) you like and I'll get them out to you ASAP. Hope you're liking Cheyenne.

<3

Congratulations.

Bins.

Yesterday and today I've made several bins or baskets (whatever you want to call them) from boxes.

Over the past year I've gathered tons of boxes of all different shapes and sizes, from diaper boxes from friends, boxes from work, boxes from Amazon... but so far I've only covered a few with basic and easy materials. One or two were covered with canvas with Tacky Glue, a few covered with fun Duct Tape, one with burlap, some with jute, some with natural sisal, etc.  I've made several boxes by taping two empty Kleenex boxes together! (see below)

I've found a million tutorials for turning regular boxes into pretty baskets. I've lost most of the links, but I was able to re-find these:

For the easy canvas cover with Tacky Glue: Let's Make Something Together

For the jute covered Kleenex box: Southern Flair Crafts

For the liners (and I need to revisit these instructions): Make It and Love It

Of course, I owe all the credit to Pinterest. Love that site. Can't say it enough.

The biggest part was sewing the liners. My wonderful mother dearest taught me how to sew growing up, but I always have problems with the stupid machines.  For Christmas, I bought myself a new sewing machine that was like 75% off (gotta love Amazon lightening deals!), which I bought for the sole purpose of making these bins.  I've been afraid to try.

With good reason.  Yesterday, when I was on a roll with my third liner, this happened:

The bobbin and ... other parts that I can't remember what they're called... fell out and I couldn't put them back together again.  I had Adam try to put them back in, and when I tried to sew a line on a scrap piece of fabric so see if he had fixed it, the needle broke.  My awesome friend Tanya came over today to look at it, and she thought she fixed it.  Anyway, long story short, later today I was about ready to cry because it fell apart again.  I played around with it and somehow fixed it myself.

I've made four liners! Three of them were all by myself!

I'm confused at what I'm saying and where I intended to go and where I'm going now and this is just a bad post. 

What's going on? 

Sigh. Let's just sum up:

It's late, I hurt (as usual), my story telling is lacking, and I'm too tired to try to edit this post. You get the idea of what I'm trying to say. Things happened, I made some cool stuff that I really love and that I am really proud of, and now I'm sharing them with you. 

The liners aren't so great, but they're getting consistently better as I go. They're kind of... bulky. Extra fabric... my lines on the hems aren't straight... and I've had to pick out and re-do several mess-ups.

And now, pictures:

These are just the boxes with the four liners, and if you were paying attention earlier and didn't skip to the pictures, you would know that I have other boxes that just need liners that aren't pictured. Plus, ~20 other boxes that need to be done from scratch. 

All of these boxes except the largest one are made from Kleenex boxes! How thrifty am I?!

The bright poppy liner box doesn't have anything interesting as the base, it's just regular duct tape. I need to do something to cover that.

Tired tired tired.

Hello.

Hello once again.

For several months, I've either gotten home from work if it was a weekday, or gotten up on a weekend, and gone straight to my Craftination Station. I've been crafting so much and have enjoyed every minute of it. Obviously I haven't posted anything, so you wouldn't ever know. I haven't even taken pictures of my products (what else would you call them? works? but it's not work, it's fun?) in weeks.

This is my stack of cards that I created in just the last week. Yesterday I created probably 15 cards. I was on a streak!

Above my work area is a window where I put some of my recent cards that I think are super spectacular. Some of them inspire me to be better. Others remind me to cheat when I want to. My brother Scott says "if your'e not cheating, you're not trying". (Actually, the first person that said that was Mark Grace).

That second to last card on the window is just printed off of the computer. I guess you could say I didn't quite cheat on it because it took a long time for me to find the exact center after a 8.5"x11" paper was split into two cards.  Then I just used fonts that I already had that I .l.o.v.e.d. and printed a bunch off. All I did to finish that one off was colored part of the letters. Maybe you'll get to see the silly detail of that card someday.

This is my photo area and my smash book that's just one page from complete.

I'm smash happy. Get it? hah.

For the record, smash books are freaking AWESOME.  I've gotten nearly every one of my friends to buy one, and not every one has gotten necessarily "into" it, but they've each tried it! I think the problem is that they think of it like a scrapbook... when it's more like a random art book and a place where you can put random mementos like ticket stubs and cards you received, and can just paint a page bright orange because you feel like it.

Last bit of update I have is this inspiration board I made of Pinterest pieces Erin and I found for a wedding reception we threw for her sister at their parent's house. It was SO much fun and such a huge adventure that I've started (and I AM going to finish) a scrapbook about it.

I haven't been on Blogger at all, so I haven't even been following your creations, Michelle. I intend to fix that immediately!

Pink.

I don't like this card.  I like the letters, but it's just boring.  It needs something else, but I'm not sure what.

Other than just putting the stickers on the card stock, I inked the entire front of the card with embossing ink, Super Fine Detail embossing powder all over it, then heated it.

So, it's kind of interesting because it's slick and shiny which gives it a cool texture, but it's still too bland for me.

Suggestions on how to make it better?