2 Baby Cards and New Found Austerity

I confess, I envy Melissa Phillips, and her ability to make all things look vintage- all here and there and sparkly and wrinkled and pouffy and quaint and lovely. I buy the same products...and make flat cards. I make un-vintagy cards, all flat and discordant and well, flat.

Today I tried again, lol. I used the R. S. Tapestry's Baby stampset and lots of different inks, a doily picked up at some party or another, along with Basic Grey Capella papers and paper ribbons. Fake silk ribbon- I will say I got a very nice bow!

I ran some pink paper through the sticky paper maker both ways to make both sides sticky. That is Martha Stewart glitter on top, and some random buttons on the bottom right corner.

I have a bunch of pieces of this pink heidi grace designs paper, and need to use some up- our new found austerity (see below) needs to kick in now! That's a SU carriage stamp from Fun and Fast Notes, paper pieced and colored a bit with Copics. Bling came from a dollar bin at a Scrapbooking show. The diecut is with Papertrey's Filigree Border Die.

Stop here if you get squeamish. Squeamish about poverty, or squeamish about mice.

I have decided I don't want to go to work anymore. How's that for an epiphany? We have lived our lives such that we have no debt- none, zero, zilch. I have been developing a new sense of myself over the past year, and knew I wanted to try poverty as a lifestyle. Now, that may sound really odd to some, but let me tell you, I believe if you all think about it, the race for acquisition is not so healthy- for us or mother nature.

The DH thinks this is a wonderful idea (he has been a stay at home dad for as long as he's been a dad). He has already developed habits that will help keep us warm and fed and happy with Very Little Income. I so appreciate all he does to allow me to not have to go off to work anymore.

Ok, so we have mice. We have mousetraps to trap and kill the mice. It is not something I like to do, but well, food is food and mice will ruin it. Imagine my surprise when I came out to the kitchen the other morning to find this-

'What is this all about?' I asked.

'It's to make sure we don't lose the cheese!' he said.

Yes boys and girls, if you run low on money, rubber band that cheese to the mousetrap, so nobody walks away with it. You'll save millions.

Spring on a grim New England day

What a grim , rainy snowy gray winter day it is today. On the other hand, we are essentially halfway thorough winter, and have not had many days like today, so that is fine! Spring, though, is always welcome.

Whenever the Papertrey countdown days start, I am inspired and want the new sets like, well... TODAY, please! Lol. Instead, I have to go find a set that is similar enough and get the card close enough...

Here is a link to Nicholes card that I think is near perfection- She used a new set available on January 15th- Lace Bouquet. I thought maybe it was time to ink up Botanical Silhouettes.

I stamped in Smokey Shadow, but colored with Prisma pencils and blended with baby oil. I also put some glitter on the flowers, just because lately I cannot stop my hand from grabbing that glitter pen. The stems are stamped in Spring Moss, and the sentiment with Onyx Black.


It is hard to see the Text Style stamped background; I did it pretty light. It looks very soft and wonderful in real life. I put the twine on vertically, since the floral stamp is more horizontal than vertical, and the text stamp did not go all of the way to the edge of the layer

Not bad, eh?

The Fix- and a Baby Boy card

I received some suggestions as to what to do to stack the PTI cubes so they wouldn't fall, and I thought this was the best; especially since it cost me nothing! I had the bag of Bazzill chips, and can easily cut them from cardboard when I run out. A bit of craft glue and here it is!

Yay for little cubes showing off their color to me just to my right on my table.

Here is a small Baby Boy card, only 3 x 4.5. Is that a 'Bar' measurement? It started as a pack of RSVP inserts I picked up off a sale table somewhere; a pack of small single layers and matching envies. I made a card from PTI's Stampers Select, and layered on a Martha Stewart print. The blue card was stamped with some flourishes from Inladinkado's Sketchy Flourishes in Versa Mark. The Onsie is SU By Ones and By Twos, colored in Copics by my DD which I then stole from her pile of discards. The sentiment is from Memory Box. Lol, since I didn't stamp and color the onsie, this card took all of 10 minutes to put together. One of those cards that takes longer to think about then to do-

Wait, I think that is always true of the cards I make!

Cubism

Not that cubism, silly, this kind!

Although I bet Picasso would love this picture of color, ha!

So here is the dilemma. I now love cubes, and lots of little bits of color on my black shelves on my desk.

Except that with the PTI new cubes, here is what invariably happens. They don't latch together in any way, so they fall over. I was thinking they might sit more firmly on each other if I removed the label. But oh la la, that label is so colorful!

I got these little desk accessories at Job Lots, and I can get 8 cubes in each one, and they stack well enough on top of the tops of the cubes...

But I can only grow so much in this direction, the little spaces will get more and more empty as my PTI collection grows in the cubism direction, and dang it, those Job Lots containers are brown, lol lol lol.


What I really want is for the PTI cubes to go in each section of the black shelf, and not fall over. I was thinking of some kind of tray with sides, maybe made from cardboard and long coffee stirrers.

This is where I need the collective imagination from my PTI friends!

prototype

couple of things-

I promise they will be layered straight, lol

the 'you're invited' should be the same color as the bottom layer

under the horses neck needs to be trimmed, not sure what happened there

the bunny is a punch; not sure how better to dress it up, unless I use patterned paper-

off to get coffee and chocolate; call me and let me know!

Outlines!

Where have I been you say? Right here, of course! Just coming out after a long period of time doing without (as much as possible) technology. We don't have a TV or cell phone, of course, but the computer takes away so much of my time that I went through a period of using it just as a resource, not as a method of communication and whatever else people say it is.

I hope to do an early retirement the first quarter of 2012, so we have been practising a 'vow of poverty'. Fun! But here is a card that was still on the camera, so I decided to get it onto the blog.



I find Outlines stamps beautiful to look at when others do them, but hard to do myself. I did a boy and a girl, and used printed papers so I wouldn't have to do so much intricate coloring.

Some doodads also helped the visual, rather than lots of glitter.


Some day I'll do an Outlines card as beautiful as the designers do, lol, but in the meantime these will have to suffice!

For Alex

Quick stamp, cut, and color. Will have to be an A-6. Will look best on a printed background, so for 15 will need 4 pices of 12 x 12. I'll play around with that tomorrow. If we do 15 with finer coloring and some more detail, their payment will need to be to take Wes for the day, since it will take us that long, I bet, to put them together. I can cut and stamp here, then bring them to you to color and glue. Next weekend or a day this week ok with me.