"Cute As Can Bee" gift box

You know how sometimes you start on a project and you think you know where it's going, or where it's supposed to go - but then it takes a few twists and turns before you end up somewhere totally different? Something like that happened to me a few days ago.

A couple of months ago, I bought a scoring board - you know, one of those 12x12 hard plastic trays that have a ton of little lines to allowe you to score paper and cardstock for cards, envelopes etc. Said item had been sitting in a corner since the day of purchase, until I decided it was finally time to brave the "newbie" and figure out what I could do with it.

Well, fast-forward a couple of weeks and I'm just completely obsessed with it! LOL I've found that, within about 10 minutes or so, I can turn almost any piece of cardstock into a box (although I have to make the lid separately - and me being the not-so-organized artist that I am, it's no big surprise that I have as yet to actually remember that I need to write down what I'm doing as I do it in, order to be able to remember it later).

I've made quite a few different ones and I'm still tinkering around with the process, but one of the boxes I made yesterday turned out so cute that I just had to share!!

I used retired yellow Stampin' Up! cardstock and scored it, cut it, and stamped little bees all over what would be the exterior of the box. Once assembled, I added a little handle cut from the same cardstock with shaper scissors - first with some scrapbooking adhesive and then with a brad to keep it firmly in place. Last but not least, I took a pretty napkin and separated the layers until I had only the patterned one left (admittedly this was a measure borne out of desperation because I couldn't find any tissue paper in my room! LOL) and filled the little box with gorgeous Molton Brown toiletries. A cherry red ribbon to pick out the roses in the napkin-come-tissue-paper, tied in a little bow, and it's ready to be given as a gift. How cute is that??

Love Is...Never Having To Give Up On Your Dreams

Wow...it's been one of those days. I had a pretty good time crafting & chatting with a friend. We plotted our plan to take over the world with our fabulous Stampin' Up! goodies and crafty genius, laughed about everything under the sun - and punched out WAY too many cardstock tags. But later in the day it all went very, very wrong.

I was feeling bored with my blog - the layout and design wasn't really representative of my creative personality, and I'd gotten to the point where I thought: what's the point? Enter a new Blogger feature, which immediately got my attention. And being a little trigger happy, I clicked before I thought it through...and my entire blog layout was messed up! I was tried to change it back and couldn't easily revert it to the previous format - so, having already felt a little frustrated, I stupidly decided that I would just delete this thread and start with a new template. Not realizing, at the time, that deleting the thread meant deleting the entire NAME of the blog!! In the split second it took me to realize the fallout, my surprisingly fast browser had already processed my action. My blog was completely gone. I was devastated. I'm so new at this and still trying to find my way, still trying to upload pictures and turn this page into something that represents me as an artist and as a person.
So I tried to retype the blog address - which of course came up with something along the lines of "blog not found". I then decided I would just start a new blog thread with the same name - but it wouldn't let me do that. EEK!

Fast-forward a few hours and my husband called me to say that he was coming home from work. I told him about my mishap, and he said it was no big deal, that he could figure out how to retrieve it - but I wasn't buying it. So imagine my surprise and delight when, simply clicking on a button on my Blogger dashboard, revealed the magic words that turned my whole evening around: UNDELETE THIS BLOG.

It's strange how something so seemingly insignificant can be so important on a particular day...Either way, I'm so happy that I was able to recover my blog, so I'm going to make an effort to post more regularly and start putting my artwork on here so that, hopefully, I can turn this blog into something fun, creative and inspirational! :)

Friendship Cards

I had a bit of an AHA! lightbulb moment a few days ago. I kept trying to figure out how to add pictures to my post and feeling a bit dense. I kept thinking, wait a minute - there's like a million bloggers out there, ranging from tweens to octagenerians, you'd think I could figure out how to add some pics! But because I was adding some YouTube videos, I kept writing my posts under the "Edit HTML" tab - hence complete missing the picture button right in the middle of the screen under the "Compose" tab. D'OH!

So, without further ado, my blog is now actually going to have some pictures - YAY! This being my first picture, I wanted to post the very first thing I made with my Stampin' Up! starter kit. Now, I don't really have a lot of experience with card-making, and I was trying to make sure I used only Stampin' Up! products so that I could, if I wanted to, put them on my demo website. I love the way the leaves came out, that color is definitely one of my favorites from the still-current range. I love mostly colors that have a bit of a vintage or retro feel, and this card definitely has a bit of a retro feel to me. I got the Vintage Vogue set in my starter kit because I loved how different elements had a pattern within them - so that the stamped image is a little more interesting than just a plain letter or floral design. The flower in the card is actually double-layered with dimensionals between the second and third petals. I love love LOVE using dimensionals - it makes everything more fun! :)

I also made another, simpler card using the Vintage Vogue set more prominently and stamping one of the bigger blooms from the Petal Pizzazz set as a background image. I got the VV set in a clear-mount to fit with the price range in my kit. Initially I was definitely apprehensive about the clear-mount stamps. I've found that acrylic stamps, to me, don't get quite the same image resolution at times as rubber stamps do - especially with craft/pigment inks, which you really just have to get the exact right amount on there. But I was very pleasantly surprised - the clear-mount stamps are easy to use, and since they're still made of rubber instead of acrylic, they give you the same resolution - but take up much less space because they're housed in a DVD case.