No Reservations

Tonight, after I finished my last post, I did some blog surfing. I read Debbie Rivers' Simply Inspired Blog where she talked about Yuki's "roadtrip" speech from Escape last week. It got me thinking....and I realized that, with respect to my crafting, I rarely have any reservations about my abilities. I look at things in that part of my life, and automatically assume I can do them. Some of them may be goals that take a long time, but I generally don't worry about how long it will take, or how my final projects will turn out. And most importantly, I think, I don't worry about whether I CAN do them. I just do. And the "just doing" of them without worrying , has lead to some wonderful success.

A perfect example of this would be Ranger's Melting Pot. At my first winter retreat with TAC in San Antonio, TAC hired Suze Weinberg from Ranger to come and show us how to use her Melting Pot. I was enchanted. I'd been eyeing it in our catalogue, but didn't know what it could do, and nobody I knew, knew what it did either. But I watched Suze, and then I went home and got one as a half price item from the catalogue. I'd barely had a chance to play with it when my upline, Pat, called to tell me that Michael's was opening a store three blocks from our houses and they were looking for instructors. She was going to be teaching papercrafting, but thought I might want to go and teach the Melting Pot. So, after only an hour or two of playing with my Melting Pot, I walked into Michael's, bold as you please, and told them I could teach classes on it. I came home, made up a poster-board of samples and took it in a few days later and suddenly I was a teacher. After a test run with the product, and an hour or more of observing Suze and reading her newsletter (she now has a blog), I was confident that I could teach it. No reservations. And I stayed at Michael's as an instructor until last spring when the organization decided that it was cutting out the classroom.

Today, I went to The Art House, a local frame shop that sells my cards for me, and picked up a scrapbook page that I asked them to frame. It just so happens to be of some very dear friends of mine at their wedding that I used as one of my samples for that original Michael's Melting Pot board. Check it out for yourself. (The Art House did an incredible job of finding a mat and frame that accent the scrapbook page perfectly!)




This whole idea of not worrying about what you can and can't do, and about what will or won't happen, fits perfectly with what Yuki talked about at our event. If you told her that she was going to leave her house for 2 months and drive 9,000 miles with all the trials and tribulations that happened on her trip, she'd never have pulled out of the driveway. But then she would not have seen the United States from coast to coast and visited places she'd never seen before and had so much fun. If you look at your various journeys, crafting or otherwise, and are concerned about what might happen, or what might not, you might be keeping yourself from doing something incredible! So I say (just like Nike did several years ago) "just do it" and see how high you can fly.

Another Awesome Trip to San Antonio!

Well I'm back from another awesome trip to San Antonio, Texas for the Angel Company's winter retreat. Several girls from the SASSY team I'm on made the trip, and we had a wonderful time, as always. Get a group of SASSYs together and you're bound to have fun.

The whole thing kicked off with the Club MED (Managers, Executives, Directors) dinner. We started with a huge piece of chocolate fudgy wudgy cake, because sometimes you just gotta break the rules. We also got big purple bling rings to wear all weekend.



The next day, we received a copy of the new magalogue. (Well, O.K., Club MED got a sneak preview, but we had to give it back). The Angel Company is returning to a yearly catalogue, which will be supplemented with a magalogue - combination magazine and catalogue. The magalogue has new stamp sets, embellishment ideas, samples on how to put a final polish on your creations, and even some technique tips. There are 44 new stamps in this magalogue, including new hostess sets. I think it serves a wide variety of tastes too. There are some cutesie stamps, collage stamps, elegant stamps, border stamps, retro stamps....something for everyone. I'm really excited about it. I've got a $300 wish list going for myself already.



We also had a couple of great speakers (my very own stamp-mom included) that shared with us their success stories, including how they manage their teams, and some of their party/class ideas.

We had some time to wander and enjoy the city too before going off to our own classes where we learned how to make some new projects.

Here are some of the general pictures I have from the trip:

On the bridge over the Riverwalk.



At the entrance to La Vallita, the craft market.



At the Scent-Chips factory and store.



Contemplating a Texas-sized sundae.



Then my camera ran out of batteries, and I brought the wrong charger. So I'll have to rely on the kindness of other angels to help me complete my scrapbook. But my SASSY sisters will come through. They always do :)

Same Card But Updated

Last year I went completely overboard with my Christmas cards. I'm not sure what I was thinking, but I must have originally been planning to send cards to an army. I made a ton of the same card. 75 of them went out in the mail to friends and relatives as intended, but that still left oodles of them in my craft room. To solve that problem, I thought I'd use them as trades at The Angel Company's Escape retreat in January. But I still came home with more than 50 of them. Were they multiplying in the dark or what?



The original card was made using Ranger's Cut n Dry Foam Pad. I put all of my snowflakes from the retired Snowflakes set on one large acrylic block and stamped it on the Cut n Dry Foam Pad. Then I added several colors of purple re-inkers. That custom pad lasted me for all of the cards I made! So that was the background. Then I used the snowman from the now retired Fun Filled Holidays set and colored him with Aquacolor Crayons and my water brush. The stars and his nose were colored with Prismacolor Pencils. Super simple! And away they went (except for the ones that stayed and bothered me because they seemed to have been wasted).

This year, with the craft show coming up, and the folks at the Art House offering to sell cards for me again, I needed to come up with a bunch of cards. So I looked at the old snowmen cards and tried to figure out how to update them into something different, but without adding too much additional work.

What I ended up doing, was cutting the front panel off all of the original cards, cutting them down by 1/4" on the top and bottom, and cutting the corners out with a corner punch. Then I added a few Crystal Stickles, and voi la! The same card but different. No waste, and I'm a happy girl.

Crafty Card Holder

What a weekend. Saturday I spent my day at the Shepard Craft show. Unfortunately, that was a bust. Not that I didn't expect it. In this economy, people are not necessarily purchasing the crafted items already made, they're wanting to make them themselves. I totally understand that. So, here's a little something that you can make yourself. It's a Christmas card holder. I want to say that I saw the concept on the Carol Duvall Show a few years ago, but I may be wrong.



I made mine with foam board, 4 pages of 12 x 12 scrpabook paper in two different patterns, adhesive, a ruler, a heated Exacto knife (using my Walnut Hollows Hot Marks Tool), but any box cutter or sharp straight blade will do, and 24 star-shaped brads.

First you want to cut two triangles from your foam board. The bottom edge will be 12 inches and the sides will be 13.5 inches.

Then you'll want to position and glue your paper onto them.

Once the adhesive is dry, you want to cut a 1/4"-wide slit from the top to approximately the 1/3rd point one one piece, and from the bottom to approximately 2/3rds up on the second. If you were to hold these up next to each other, the slits should meet.



Next, you want to make small cuts every 2 inches where the cards will go. These should alternate on each piece so that the cards don't bump into each other. For example, on one of the pieces, you want to start your slits 1 inch from the top, and make them every 2 inches, and on the other, you want to start 2 inches from the top and make them every 2 inches.



Now you're ready to assemble the tree. Simply line up each of the slits so that the tree becomes dimensional.




The final touch is to add the star brads between each of the card slits.



Now you're ready for the cards.

Broke my punch

I've been busy making Christmas cards for the Shepard Craft Fair. For one of them, I'm using up some paper I had left over from the Basic Grey Blitzen Collection. I cut the scraps I had into strips and used them on the card below. Then I embellished them with layered snowflakes made from my graduated sizes of McGill snowflake punches. I was using the small and medium sized punches and apparently punched so many times, I broke my medium size punch. I've been looking all over for one and couldn't find a replacement. So I had to get the QuicKutz snowflake die instead and figure out how to run it through my Big Shot. Worked fine after adding a few shims. Here is the result.

Reece Reindeer Christmas Card

I've been making a bunch of cards this week, first in anticipation of my Stamp a Stack yesterday and then because I'm hoping that I will be participating in one of our high school's annual craft shows. The show will be December 6th, and I should be hearing from them some time this week. So I have been and will be making up a bunch of cards, and will be posting some of them over the next few weeks.

The first one is this card I made for my Stamp a Stack yesterday. We used The Angel Company's Reece Soar With It paper collection and stamped the main image from their Christmas Season stamp set. The image is colored with watercolor pencils, which made it super quick and easy. I ran the edge of the red mat through one of the Cuttlebug border embossing folders and cut around the embossed edge. Then added a ribbon for a little more detail. All in all, this card is very quick to make, and you can get 9 of them from the patterned piece of Reece paper (12 if you make the patterned panel 1/2 an inch smaller).

Beagle Welcome Cupcake Challenge

My desk neighbor at work, Angela, is helping her local shelter by fostering two beagle puppies, starting this weekend. Unfortunately, the economy is hitting our area hard enough that people are giving up their pets because they are unable to feed them. Angela's friend works at the shelter and told her that pets are coming in so fast that they are running out of room to keep them, which means that if someone doesn't adopt them, or offer to foster them, they will be "destroyed" at a faster pace.

Destroyed....what a horrible word to use with respect to helpless animals that have lead their lives at the mercy of humans, and served them well with friendship and loyalty. Although I understand the position the shelter is in, and the position of those families that are forced to give up their pets because times are so tight, it's so sad to me that it has come to this. I would consider it myself, but we fostered one dog a few years ago, and ultimately had to give him up because of complaints from our neighbors that we were violating the condo association rules. That, and we don't currently have a work schedule that would allow us to give a dog the kind of attention it would need.

Since Angela is taking on a few extra puppies, which in her heart she knows will not be fostered and returned, but will ultimately become part of her household, I decided to make her this card to welcome them, and I used Taylor's Cupcake Challenge as the template. The inside of the card says "Acquiring a dog may be the only chance a human ever has to choose a relative". The beagle and sentiment stamps are by Stamping Sensations. The dog prints are a stamp that I've had for so long, I no longer know who made it, and the darker brown background is made from brown paper with a tan core, that I put paw prints on using a Fiskars texture template and then sanded so that the tan showed through. The friends ribbon came from Target's dollar section last month. The card will accompany a matching jar of puppy treats that isn't quite finished.

I'm sure Angela will be tickled, and I'm happy to do something nice for the puppies too.