SISTERHOOD OF SNARKY STAMPERS CHALLENGE #258

As the reigning Queen of Snark since December 10th, I'm guest designing on their first challenge of the year - an auspicious beginning, just saying! This challenge's theme is "NBUS". We all know what that means - Never Been Used Sh*t.

Sisterhood of Snarky Stampers: SoSS #258 - N is for NBUS (Never Been Used Stuff)

There's a bit of a back story on this card. Four old colleagues (3 interior designers and an architect) started meeting last year on the 4th Tuesday of each month to taste wine and swap stories. I call our group the "4th Tuesday Whiners Club". One of our members is my former business partner of several years until she retired, and she has a birthday coming up in less than a month so I'm taking this opportunity to use this card for her birthday.

The NBUS things are, 1) sentiment from Unity Stamps, 2) background paper from Alexandra Renke, and 3) a technique I haven't tried before. I started with a square panel of Alexandra Renke printed paper that has a copyright date of 2017 (have I really been hoarding it that long?). The technique I started with was to stamp the wine bottle outline (Unity Stamps "Age Gets Better with Wine") directly onto the printed panel and color it in with my Copic markers. I was very surprised that I could get such good coverage because it seems like sometimes the inks on printed papers interfere with marker coverage. The wine label is from a local vineyard that is one of our favorites - Cliff Creek Cellars. I printed it from their website. This particular grape (Syrah) is one of my friend's favorite wines from this vineyard and my plan is to accompany this card with a bottle of the wine.

Once the wine bottle was completed, I masked it off and stamped the wine glass twice - once in place and a second time on white cardstock. I colored and pieced the wine glass over the image after coloring in the glass part with white Prismacolor pencil. Before gluing the glass in place, I stamped wine splatters over the area where the sentiment would be stamped. Even though I used black heat embossing on the sentiment, I'm wondering if I should have used white on it instead of black. I'm a bit disappointed with the lack of clarity of the sentiment. 

On a Personal Note: As I worked on this card today, I just couldn't resist photographing our two kitty brothers while they cuddled and slept in a chair by the living room window. This is Tux and Tiger and they are Chloe's boys.

FIRST VALENTINE OF 2025

Inspired by two challenges - Freshly Made Sketches #667 and Color Hues Challenge #101 - Red & Kraft, I set out this morning to make my first Valentine of the year. I love making Valentines almost as much as I love making Halloween cards! 

I started by creating a 5-1/2" square card base and cut two additional smaller square panels in white and kraft cardstock. I die-cut the top layer of Birch Press Design "Folk Art Heart" from the center of the white square and matted it with the kraft square, slipping a piece of red cardstock between the layers as the background for the layered heart. Then I die cut two additional layers of the pattern in kraft and a lighter color of red and glued them all in place, adding the final layer - the white top layer I had originally cut from the white square. I attached the layers to the face of the card and added a white heat-embossed sentiment on a strip of black cardstock and a double bow from Tim Holtz "Vault Festive Wreath". The final step was a tiny bit of bling with some small rhinestones. I'll make a coordinating envelope at a later date. 

I don't think I'll use this design for this year's edition for a couple of reasons - 1) it's too complex for an edition of 30, and 2) it's square and too expensive to mail out. I'll save it for someone special and hand deliver it. 

Here are the links to the two challenges:

Freshly Made Sketches: Freshly Made Sketches #667 - A Sketch by Cécile

Color Hues: Color Hues Color Challenge #101 - Red & Kraft

JANUARY 2025 TWO OLD BATS HALLOWEEN CHALLENGE

Oh my goodness, how did we ever make it into 2025 - and is everyone as happy as I am to see the end of 2024? 

And so the Halloween cards continue...

We have a new inspiration board! The obvious imagery for this month is snow - and oh, pumpkins. Generally by this time each year we would have had a bit of snow here in the Rogue Valley, but not this year. It has rained non-stop since Christmas and I would really welcome a respite from the damp.

Two Old Bats Halloween Challenge: January 2025 Anything Goes Halloween

The main image on my card - the snow and tree outline - is a Christmas die with a snowman. I thought to just add a die-cut pumpkin head on top, but the scale was wrong, so I cut the snowman off and placed two ghost pumpkins (Tim Holtz) to the right corner. I blind-embossed snow from a Darice folder and glued it to the face of a black card base after slipping in a printed paper with eerie pairs of eyes in the night. I also cut out some of the eyes to use in the pumpkin's eye openings. The sentiment is cut from a piece of vintage Halloween paper. 

Let's get this year started!! Let's see what you can do with the new inspiration board - or whatever Halloween project you would like to share with us. Last month was understandably quiet, but if we can get to 25 entries this month, the random drawing will bring someone these really cute Whimsy alien dies:

  

2025 ARRIVES

And it's noisy and chaotic and I'm feeling the need to spend a couple of moments in reflection.

My husband gifted me a smart watch for Christmas. I had wanted one primarily to track my physical activity, but it does so much more than that. I'm not accustomed to paying a lot of attention to my heartbeat, so this is a bit of a change. One really interesting thing I've noticed is that my heartbeat drops by at least 10 beats per minute while I'm here in my craft room making cards! 

I don't have to think very deeply to come to the realization that for me making cards is truly an act of love. It calms me and keeps me in the moment - it's a very small thing, but it ripples outward in ways that I can only begin to sense.

From the beginning of this little blog (March 22, 2019), I've made a conscious decision to leave politics out of my posts and make this place one of peace and creativity and I will continue to do so - however, it's hard to think about leaving 2024 without some mention of our global chaos and how it tumbles out into our atmosphere in erratic and destructive patterns. If a small moment of calm and loving activity can break some of these patterns, that has to be huge.

So, for anyone who may find his/her way to my little blog, I wish the best for you in what will no doubt be a very challenging year. I hope you'll join me in setting aside time each day to perform or create a small calming act of love. It sounds silly to suggest that handmaking cards can solve the world's problems, but hey, we have to start somewhere, using the gifts we have!