Happy New Year!

Have you remembered to write 2014 in a date field yet?

We're well into the new year at this point, but as my "holiday" cards went out only last week, I'm still in New Year's mode.  And New Year's for me is a time of new beginnings.  I tend to think about resolutions, rather than actually make them - I don't know, maybe to hold myself less accountable for them, or forgive myself in advance if I can't actually follow through - but there's still a small list that I work from and think about periodically.  This year's items seem to be centered around home, ironic in a year when many of the months ahead feature intense travel.  Here are a couple of the things I'm thinking about:

-Cook!  I'm not an intuitive cook.  I really just want to follow recipes that someone else has created and tested and hope that they really work the way the book says they're going to (ha!).  My goal for the year is to make an actual dinner that is more than just thrown together, and likely following recipes, at least once a week.  To make this even vaguely plausible for me, I have to plan.  I can't necessarily count on choosing something and having all of the ingredients already at home.  So I have to choose a recipe in advance, make a shopping list, actually shop, and then I'm ready to go for it.  So far this year I've done scallops, chicken with a honey glaze and an apricot sauce, and a quick poached fish, and I think one other thing that I can't remember.  If this ridiculously cold weather keeps up, there will definitely be some stews in my future.

To aid in my cooking Project, Craig got me an actual, real person's kitchen knife as a holiday gift.  I don't really like big knives.  They are scary.  I will be the first person to admit that I don't know how to use one.  And yes, I know that sharp knives are safer and big knives make everything easier, but I've never had one of any quality (and no, the cheap set from Ikea that bends if you look at it doesn't count) to practice with.  Now I do.  And it works!  Yay!  What should I make next week?

-Crafts!  Of course.  I always want to do crafts.  I've even had runs of several weeks at a time when I have free evenings to spend in the craft room.  But more frequently I don't.  And moreover, I want to do crafts in company.  The stuff that I do is solitary in nature, and I like my space, and as long as I have music on, it's often company enough.  But what I think would be really fun is a regular - once a month, even - gathering of people who bring their own crafty projects to a location.  It's a MeetUp or a tea party or a chance to gossip, or all of the above.  I haven't quite figured it out yet, and I don't really want to take on another organization project, but if by some slim chance of the imagination you're out there, live where I live, and want a crafting evening, let me know, and I will attempt to figure something out.

Photo of this year's prescient holiday card by C. Whear

Have a wonderful 2014!

Embossing obsession…

If you are crafty, like me (no, not wily, crafty…) you know that craft obsessions come and go.  I’ve had my beaded flowers period, my cross stitch period, and I’m still convinced that I’m going to make a basket out of buttons one of these years. 

Not made by me - but I have the buttons and the instructions!

But my enduring obsession has been rubber stamps, and making greeting cards.

The world of rubber stamping has changed so much in the short amount of time I’ve been playing along.  Finding the right stamps that fit my tastes was and is a challenge, but as mail order catalogues have given way to internet shopping, that challenge has shifted, but not disappeared.  More on that in another post.

One of the biggest changes to this very small world is due to the rise of the scrapbooking movement – taking all of your photos and mounting them artfully with text and/or other ephemera and souvenirs.  The scrapbooking craze made papercraft materials more varied, plentiful, and widely available than ever.  Machines and papers that were only in stationers and copy shops were suddenly on the shelves at big box craft stores and smaller specialty stores around the country.  I was mostly oblivious to this as it was happening.

In my rubber stamping haze, I was slow to focus on paper.  I’ve almost always started with a white card stock base, layering images, color, other paper elements, but always with a rubber stamp focus. 

Birthday card - 2006

Then there was my amazing discovery of duplex paper – cardstock that was colored on one side and white on the other – it is still a must have in my craft room.  But now, it’s not color that’s got me hooked, it’s texture.

At some point along the road I realized that crafters had these manual machines that do magical things and allow you to crank out die-cut images, but also add texture to your paper.  It’s simple, it’s amazing, and I can’t get enough of it.  It’s not even electronic!  I now look for embossing folders everywhere I go.  Like the quest for the perfect rubber stamps in my earlier crafting years, now I make lists of companies and the designs they have and wonder why I can’t ever find them locally or easily. 

The conundrum for me is making the texture fit in with my stamping style, which remains mostly two-dimensional.  What I commonly see in online photo galleries are cards that feature textured panels with little to no stamped images or sentiments, or cards that use textured papers as backgrounds where the embossed image is largely obscured.  I’m looking for ideas somewhere in the middle.

Image made from embossed brass stencil in 2010 - note - NO rubber stamps!

I have a beginning…

Moose Day 2011

2013

…but ideas are welcome.  Send me thoughts, links to images, or better yet, come over for a craft night!  I’ll supply the texture…

Cards for sale...

So this month I did something I'd been thinking about doing for a long time, but hadn't quite gotten around to:  I made all-occasion card sets to sell at camp.

I don't consider myself an artist.  I just like to play with paper and rubber stamps and ink and double-face tape.  The idea of selling cards seems like a simple, enchanting way to make money, but it's, of course, more complicated than that.

-Many rubber stamp images are under copyright, which means you can't sell anything with that image without specific permission or a monetary arrangement with the copyright holder.  But the good news is that many stamp manufacturers will allow you to sell small numbers of works with their images as long as it is hand-stamped and not reproduced via a copier or printer, and sold in informal venues.  Like at a dance camp.  I had to choose my images carefully to make sure they were under these "angel" policies.  But as many of you know, I have plenty of stamps, so this was not really an issue.

-Trying to make money from small-time crafts is tricky because you have to try and figure out what the public wants.  The more you cater to public whims and desires, and the more you reproduce a simple image, or work with one single theme, the less fun it can be to create.  But luckily for me, I don't think that selling cards will ever really be a money-maker for me, so I stuck with a few guidelines for this first endeavour:

• A single, simple design for all of the cards
• Sets of six cards and envelopes, each with 1-3 images
• White base for all cards with a single color accent
• Object images that were not cute, but fun 

I'm also used to making large numbers of cards that are easy to replicate in small amounts of time.  It was fun to finally decide I was going to do this in mid-July, and then have 14 sets to sell by the time I left for camp on 8/3.

Results:  I sold 9 of the 14 sets!  Success!!!

The take away:

-I'm glad I went into this venture with the attitude that if the cards didn't sell, I would have my own thank you/all-occasion cards for the whole year.  (I still might - see leftovers above.)  I'm still glad that over half of my inventory sold.
-Will I do it again?  Probably.  But likely not often.  Selling at camp is easy.  Selling at other gigs maybe okay, but I'll have to see if it's worth it.
-Tools make all the difference.  One of the reasons I was able to make these cards so quickly is because I purchased a paper cutter last year, and then a scoring board this summer so I could fold the cards perfectly and easily every time.
-I really like the A2 size (okay, what they seem to call A2 in the US...) of 4.25' x 5.5".  It's easy to create those from standard size paper with minimal fuss.  
-I suspect that every time I decide to sell, I'll probably want to make new cards, as well as try to sell off the older ones.  I will always keep the designs simple so it's easy to make a bunch of them, but that the designs will be different each time.  For instance, this first group were all object images:  kitchen implements, yarn, clocks, shoes, etc., mounted on color, mounted on white.  The next set maybe very colorful by comparison, use texture, feature vellum, etc.

Wish me luck!  Send me card ideas!  And if you're interested in a lovely set of cards with clocks, yarn, shoes, or radishes on them, let me know...

Twenty years of valentines...

I realized this year that I had been making valentines for some time now. My earliest efforts as an adult were cut-up sections of wrapping paper, always with a valentine-esque quote on the inside (I remember that my first quote was part of the very brief love scene at the end of Henry V, indicative of my complete crush on Kenneth Brannagh. Swoon!).



Once rubber stamping came into my life after my senior year in college, there was no going back. I realized this year that the interior quotes moved first to the outside of the cards, and then disappeared entirely.



Part of that was a time crunch - if it wasn't part of the process of making the card itself, it wasn't going in. It was too labour-intensive to do all of that writing!



But I missed the words, which are faithfully part of so many of my creations, even if you can't read them. This year's offering returns the quote to the interior:



"One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life; that word is love." -Sophocles

Happy Valentine's Day!

A scary amount of rubber stamp geekiness...

This past weekend as I was preparing for this year's valentine-making party (that never got off the ground due to the 700 inches of snow that fell this weekend) and puttering around in the craft room, I decided to find space for the new stamps I'd acquired over the last year. As I began fitting stamps into the new sets of drawers seen in the photo below I pondered a stamp organization problem...



Fitting the stamps in drawers and then noting down in my catalog which stamps are in which drawer is great, but occasions like the valentine party present another challenge: what happens when a drawerful of stamps gets dumped out, and the same stamps just won't fit neatly in the drawer again. The puzzle has become undone.

Enter the digital camera! It suddenly hit me that I can now photograph the contents of each drawer, print the photos, and not only have a catalogue of stamp images, but also a record of how precisely they are stored.

Photographing all of the drawers, which each have 2 or three layers of stamps, will take forever, but here are my first shots:




Drawer 5 - Valentine stamps, mostly



Drawer 31, Layer 1 - Moose



Drawer 31 - Layer 2 - more moose

Can you guess what my valentines look like??

Craftiness...

It never fails. Every time I undertake a large-scale craft project, say, making holiday cards, I look around my craft room, shake my head at the sheer volume of stuff there, and vow that for this project, I will use only what I have and not buy anything new. Good theory, no? Somehow it never quite works that way. Take this year's cards, for example (just finished tonight! hooray!):



I knew I wanted to do something with an embossed element. I had no ideas beyond that. Then in looking for something else a week or so ago, I came across these tags I've had since who-knows-when. The design sprang from that. I played with it, selected some stamps, made a prototype, made a plan, and I was good to go.

I tend toward dark blue or green card stock for a base. I had a bunch of navy duplex stock (a different color on each side, lue and white in this case) that was no longer flat despite laying flat continuously. Sure enough, I didn't have enough. No problem - I had some red to use up as well. Next supply: tags. I ended up having only half as many as I needed. This led to the first trip to the store, a package of 100 tags, and now as many, if not more left over than I had to start with!

I'd overlooked the fact that the tags I already had had no string or ribbon on them. But I have a drawer full of ribbon. No issues, right? Wrong. I never have enough of the right color or quality. But I had almost enough of the white organza ribbon I wanted so I was content to improvise on the last five or so. Luckily all of the new tags come complete with string already attached.

Inks are always a dicey proposition for me. I have a ton of them, but they don't, in fact, last forever. I never know which ink pads will be extant when I sit down. Luckily, though not all of the inks worked out as I had hoped, I was able to regroup and not purchase anything new.

Last element - the sentiment. I tend to be minimalist in the sentiment on my cards at holiday time, not wanting them to be Christmas cards, but more generic. This year's sentiment is very brief: Joy. I tried creating the word with alphabet stamps, but none I had were the right font and size. Then in looking through my word stamps, I came across a quote that included the word. I was in business - stamp out the quote, cut out the word. Alas, that left me with a small bit of paper to adhere to the card - difficult, but not impossible, though possibly time consuming.

I'm a fan of dry adhesives, preferring them to the messy and not quick enough to dry glues out there. Double-face tape is my friend and constant companion in the craft room. But no tape I own is narrow enough for these tiny pieces of paper. Last year I had a similar issue and used a product called Glue Dots, which were perfect for sticking small pieces of paper to each other, etc. And, I had some left! But of course, the dots I had were too big for my one brief word. Another trip to the store, this time the dangerous craft store, for, yes, micro glue dots! (That's all I bought. Really.) They were perfect.

Finally, tonight, all supplies in place, all elements complete, all address labels printed and postage stamps purchased, all that is left is to write a million notes and pop them in the mail!

Pencils as art...

Now this would be overkill, even for me:



Image from Social Designer, Goods for the Greater Good

I made it happen...

After all, it's nothing a trip to Ikea can't take care of...



Once upon a time you could walk into Ikea and buy these sturdy sets of drawers ready to go. Now you have to put them together, and they are not quite big enough and they are never quite square when you are finished, but they are, nevertheless, perfect in this setting. I now have a place for the miscellaneous things that need gathering, and a raised surface for the things I always need to hand - wipes for stamp cleaning, double-sided tape, exacto knife, without sacrificing usable desk surface. I love it already, only a day after final assembly. (And inevitably, stamps will end up in a decent portion of those drawers I'm guessing...)

And yes, the craft room will never be finished, but it's slowly getting into shape!

Someone else's story...

Sometimes I think the real purpose of many of the blogs I follow is to spread news around, not to post new and original ideas. This post will emulate that line of thinking...



Image: Kriss's Color Stripes. This image reminded me that I have a couple of shelves to put up in my craft room but haven't gotten around to doing so. I love this idea of an instant shelf/hutch that incorporates storage for small items. I could probably make this happen with some of my sets of stamp drawers from Ikea...

Next find: Are you ever in a cafe, trying to keep track of the time so that you don't over-steep your tea, but in danger of being distracted by whatever else is happening on your laptop? Well, now there's a website just for you (this thought from Teaspoon & Petals).

Well, two unoriginal ideas will have to suffice. Perhaps more to come from my house, garden, life when the miasma of this cold and current streak of weather lifts...

Bits and Pieces

A few images from the last week:



In my opinion, the picture doesn't do this birthday card justice. It's simple, but cute, and I stole the idea fair and square from a magazine. It satisfies my love of grid patterns and embossed papers (embossed by my very own self).



I finally sorted through all of my fabric scraps, and discarded the two by nothing bits that weren't good for a thing. The remainders just fit into the eight bins I bought (from the Container Store, of course) which fit neatly on my top two shelves. It's hard to imagine how one that hardly sews can end up with fabric to fill eight bins, but there it is. And yes, there is more fabric in my trunk, but I'm afraid to look...



And finally, my rose bloomed over the weekend! I first thought it would be red, but the picture barely does justice to the dark fushia/pink. Dare I cut any blooms to adorn my house?? I need a cutting garden. Maybe next year...

Craft Room progress report

Warning - this post contains about a million pictures!

This past weekend I finally got some quality time at home, the last such weekend for about a month. I used the time to make progress on my craft room reorganization.

On Satruday morning, after a quick run to Cherry Hill to pick up the last piece of my shelving system from the container store, I got to work making the craft room ready. I moved bookcases, crates, filing cabinets, etc. A bunch of things took up temporary residence in the hallway.



By early afternoon, the future shelving area was clear and ready for what I thought would be the simple job of hanging the single track that all of the shelving hangs from. Silly me...



Because I don't have a lot of experience hanging things that need to be really level unsupervised. I asked a friend to come and help me with that bit. While I waited for his arrival, I put together the drawer frames. One of the beauties of this Elfa system is that it goes together easily. What I like even more though is that the instuctions included with each component are very explicit and easy to follow.



Well, the drawere frames were the easy part of the day... I chose to hang the shelves on an outer wall of my house. No problem, said the nice lady from the Container Store who sold me the screws and anchors for plaster walls (which seemed really strong and sturdy). Problem. The screws are 3". The gap between the plaster and the outside brick is about 2". So, off we went to the hardware store to find shorter screws. Then we couldn't get the fancy anchors all the way in. So we tried different anchors I had in the house. Almost, but now they're not as happy or secure with the screws. We try a few more things. In the end, I made a second trip to Cherry Hill and purchased the screws and anchors meant for dry wall. They're still as strong, but shorter, and therefore, perfect. By about 10:30pm, the top track was up!

I had this notion that I would go to bed as soon as the top track was up, but no, not possible. I started putting up the brackets...

...and the shelves. I liked this spacing, but discovered I didn't leave enough room for the drawer units to fit below. I waited until Sunday to reconfigure.

I spent quality time on the ladder Sunday morning working on shelf spacing. This is what I settled on.

Next, I completed the drawer units and put them in place. As an added bonus, the drawer legs fit neatly over the radiator pipe and don't interfere with the phone jack that's near the floor.

Almost immediately I began filling the drawers. It's so great to have the space to be organized!!!

By the time I stopped working on it tonight, the upper shelves were filled with my fabric (greatly in need of sorting and perhaps storage in bins), and most of the drawers were filled. Imagine, I have a drawer full of nothing else but ribbon! I took advantage of one of the extra shelf brackets to hang ebroidery hoops from (where did I get that many hoops?)

Over the next many days, I hope to keep working on this. Even if I only unpack a few things at a time, that will be enough to keep the momentum going. Stay tuned for more posts as the sorting/rediscovery of stuff I'd forgotten about process continues!

It's going to get worse before it gets better...

One of the many things I love about my house is the craft room. I am astounded by the amount of stuff I have that's craft related: rubber stamps, package upon package of fabric, paper, beads, yarn, stuff! The picture below is indicative of my current storage technique:

You'll notice the unit under the windows, the two tall wooden shelves, the stack of crates, and the small drawer unit. And this is only one side of the room. There's more like that. And every piece is full.

So in an attempt to create order out of chaos and take advantage of my 9' ceilings, thanks to the Container Store, their sale on Elfa shelving, and the generosity of my mother, we have a plan!

This whole wall between the windows will become shelves and drawers. I have all of the materials except for one shelf which I can pick up next week. The whole thing requires assembly, of course, but the only thing that requres skill and power tools is hanging the strip just below the ceiling that all of the shelves will hang from. After that, the shelves and drawer units will go up quickly.

It will look something like this, minus the green wall, and taking into account the radiator that juts out inconveniently into the space:

But of course it's not really that easy. The room is full of stuff, and the wall of future shelves has that charming array of pieces already there. I've created only the rudiments of a master plan to deal with this all.

The first step for me was dismantling my old desk in the corner, the file cabinets and desk top I've had since junior high, and pushing the table that was in the center of the room into the corner. The file cabinets have to go. They're bent and have drawers that hate to open. Their contents will go in the new unit. I'll save the desk top and possibly get some new legs for it (from Ikea?) to use as an extra work space/cutting table when needed. Here's the desk on its way to not existing:

I did not photograph the pile of fabric bags that were under the desk, though you can see some of them above. The next step is to move the tall wooden shelves that are currently against the key wall elsewhere, and to get help hanging that top track. Stay tuned for progress updates. and let me know if you feel like constructing drawers some time!

The renewed crafting bug...

Because I am a big fool, I stole some time on Saturday morning to run up to a rubber stamp show in Allentown (only an hour away!). I'm sure I've posted about these shows in the past, and this one was no exception. But still, as there are no good, independent craft stores nearby, I feel compelled to go to any show that's reasonably close and on a day when I'm free.

I thought I was going to escape mostly unscathed from this one. A few little stamps called to me. I gave in and bought a few sets of Inkadinkado clear stamps you use with acrylic blocks.

These bridge the gap between mounted and unmounted stampsd for me. They are cheaper and easier to store than wood-mouned stamps, and cling easily to acrylic blocks (which I just happened to alread own a few of). I can't wait to try these!

All of the booths at the show also feature demonstrations of new ideas and techniques you can try with the products being sold there. While I was waiting on line to pay for the clear stamps, the demonstrator was showing how to emboss paper quickly and easily using embossing dies and brass stencils and a machine called a CuttleBug. It was amazing!!!

I've played around with paper embossing in a number of ways: with brass stencils and Fiskars texture plates, but they all have the same problem - they're too time consuming, and I don't have that much time. But with this machine, it takes seconds to make a beautiful background paper.

Oh, I could go on and gush, but I won't. Needless to say, I went to Michaels today and bought one and have already tested it out. And yes, I love it.

Much depends on the dies you have, and I have next to none at the moment. I have many brass stencils though, and as soon as I get the right layer to use so they don't kill the machine, I'm golden. Here are a few examples of the patterns I'm longing for:

And of course, the first one I bought:

It's almost garden party season...

Here's an amazing, and amazingly doable idea from Decor8.

I think I have a few lanterns in the house I could possibly use for this...

Inspiration!

Suddenly, out of nowhere, I know what I need to do in my craft room to make it a much more useful space. And yes, this will necessitate a trip to the Container Store. Or more than one. And a free day/weekend to make it all happen. Which means by about May, I should be golden.

If I'm really together, I will take pictures of the progress. For the moment, here's some Container Store inspiration...

Girly nostalgia...

Growing up I always loved paper dolls, and just about any thing you could pop out of a book. The tooth fairy once brought me a memorable village to be popped out and assembled. Hot stuff!

With Valentine's just past, I came across a set of Joan Walsh Anglund paper dolls here.
Anglund is best known for ultra cute children with no discernible mouth - better seen than heard. But I always found them charming.

I had this vague memory of another set of paper dolls I liked, and sure enough, thank to the internet, I found them. Does anyone else remember the Gingham Girls?

They had many outfits and different personalities and Katie even had an ice cream shop (but I'm sure it was a shoppe).

Do girls still play with paper dolls? Is it all Barbie and stuff from cartoons or are there others out there from books or from some other source? Or has paper given way to electrons in this instance as well?

What stamp is this?

In my continuing search for rubber stamping blogs that are a good fit for me (more on that later this week), I came across this card on Lani Kent's blog Healing Expressions via Deb Neerman's Blog, Paper, Ink, Scissors & Stamps. I love the central stamped image. Any clue as to where I can find this stamp?

I dream about storage space...

Someday, all of the little drawers and cubbies will be mine...

C is for Crafts...

Tonight I invited a few folks over for crafts. Never mind it was really too hot to contemplate crafts, but I knew without the incentive to get the craft room ready for more than just myself, I would never do anything. Too true.

So I scurried after work and moved things around and put some things away, and realized that I have a heck of a lot of craft stuff. How did it all fit down on 8th Street.

It's also amazing how we can finish with a hobby, and still retain all of the stuff. Am I ready to admit to myself that my cross stitch and beaded flower days are over? Can I be diligent and just finish up the few cross stitch projects that I left in progress forever ago and then give away all of the stuff? Can I make the beaded flower hair clips I have in mind and then move on? Will I ever really quill paper, make the one basket I bought a kit for, and finally construct that bag out of buttons? Can I talk myself out of my new idea of soap-making?

The problem is that I want to do all of these things, but I don't have the time. And will likely never attain sufficient time for all of this. I haven't even mentioned the bags of yarn for crocheting and the bins of leftover quilting fabric. I hardly sew!

It's crazy and I love all of it and I want to organize it and make stuff and...

And come over and craft with me some time. Help me use my stuff. The rubber stamps aren't going anywhere!

Craft room decorating scheme...

Because I have to buy a tooth and a car (of similar prices), I now need to go back to my money making schemes. Renting the 3rd floor, check. Eating Ramen, well, not every night, but I have some in the house. Making craft items for sale, well...

The good news is that soon I will be able to make craft items at all! Last night, Jennifer and I put together my lovely table from Ikea, and over the next several days, I plan to whip the craft room into shape so I can start using it.

I've decided that I'm going to leave the walls in that room the white color they are, and use that space for more free-form, collage-y wall decorations. I recently realized that in every room I had in college, on my bulletin boards at work, I've created these assembleges of images - postcards, fortune cookie fortunes, quotes from magazines, old calendar images, comics, anything, arranged in random patterns as I amass the images. Yes, it's another collection of small things, all posted, making me happy as I look up at them. It's a cross of these two ideas:




Unframed, mostly paper, but arranged geometrically, like pieces of a puzzle that fit.

I'll be able to pull out some of those images from back in school - flower alphabet cards and my collection of Sierra Club tree images, and the new things that have been waiting for a place - panels of postage stamps and paint samples and clippings from magazines.

It's tempting to paint the whole room with magnet paint, but instead I'll just make sure to stock up on masking tape. And then I have to figure out where I put those bags of cards and piles of paper. Probably already somewhere in the craft room.

Stay tuned...