Finally Back to Crafting!

Aloha, all!

     My Craft Room is finally back in order – and all my paper slots are labeled with the new colors that will be coming out very soon.  Retiring stuff is all packed up for my Summer Open House, and there are empty boxes ready for all those retiring stamp sets to be added to the stash.

     And now I can craft!  I understood going into my cleaning project that things were out of hand.  But I didn't realize how MUCH out of hand until I started coming across all these old copies of the demonstrator magazine, "Stampin' Success."  Last evening, I started paging through some of them, and came across an idea for a card in the May 2009 issue that used the stamp set, D is For Dog.  Ah ha!  I have been wanting to use one of the quotations from the new stamp set, Favorite Thoughts, with the set, C is for Cat.  And now I had a wonderfully clean craft room and the time to make it!  Do you see all those exclamation points.  I know I'm an exclamation point queen, but I really, really do feel elated that this project is done!

     Anyway, I woke up this morning and looked at the card and thought, "Hmmm.  It's cute, but who do I send it to?  What's the occasion?"  OK, back to the drawing board (all cleaned off, I might add!).  And the 6" x 6" scrap page was created.  Cholla (cho-ya) the Cat is, indeed, the Queen of our household, and she is treated thusly.

     Both projects use Melon Mambo card stock and ink (this is a color that Stampin' Up! is keeping) and the accent color is Crushed Curry (yes, I had to go dig the card stock and ribbon out of one of the packed boxes, but all is nicely put away again).  The little gold fish were stamped onto Crushed Curry with a stamp from C is For Cat, trimmed and then turned over to show just the card stock.

     The technique that I picked up from the magazine was to texturize your card stock with some simple, straight-line scoring.  The card shows one side of the scored paper and the scrap page shows the other.  I think that both look equally good; it's really just a matter of personal preference and the project involved. 

     The card layout here isn't anything really special.  But I encourage you to work with your scoring tool (I used Stampin' Up!'s Fiskars cutter with the scoring blade) to make some designs with whatever card stock you have. 

     Have fun crafting.  I'm going to be doing the same now that I can find everything!