CoronaCrafts - Mini-inventory

The days are so strange now, and so monotonous that I can't even remember what I did this past weekend.  Sunday, of course, was Easter, which I don't celebrate, except for watching Easter Parade every year.  Though I don't celebrate, Easter was always an important time of year for me because that's when there was an influx of bunnies, my stuffed animal of choice in my formative years, in stores.  While most of my early bunnies are gone, I still like bunny images.  Last year on Easter Sunday, I made this card:

I used the Gina K wreath builder stencil, the Simon Says Stamp Oh Bunny set, and the Kiss Kiss set from Right at Home for the sentiment.

This year, the spirit wasn't moving me, but as I've been doing a bunch of stamp organizing and cataloging, in addition to trying to make and send a lot of cards, I decided to round up all of my bunny stamps, just for kicks.  I knew I had more than the set I used last year.  Yup.  I was right.

(I'm not going to even attempt to tag all of these images, but for all three of you reading this, if you really want to know where any of the images comes from, just ask.)

The fun, yet time consuming thing about this process was that I pulled together wood-mounted, cling-mounted and clear stamps in a single place.  This is my ultimate goal for my entire collection, but right now, my clear stamps are cataloged and tagged on Airtable, [most of] my wood mounted stamps are in organized by category in a physical paper catalog I've been keeping for years and years, and my cling stamps are inbetwixt inbetween.  But if this stay-at-home order lasts for much longer, I will have time to not only finish adding all of my unmounted stamps to the physical catalog, but create more specialty sub-category pages like these.

(Lies.  I will never be done organizing my stamps.)

CoronaCrafts - Making Multiples

Now if every day at home could be the perfect sunny spring day today was, all would be well...

In my card-making life, usually I'm making single cards at a time for letters, thank you notes, birthday cards, and the like, or many, many of the same card at holiday times.  During this CoronaCrafts era of my card-making, I'm mostly staying away from multiples and trying to make cards that suit the intended recipients.  But not always, and not this past weekend.  I'll talk about one set of multiples today and one tomorrow.

Yesterday, I made three more of my Dangerous Business cards, bringing the total up to eight.  I wrote about the first two about two weeks ago.  I'm this series a way to test out some Distress Oxide color combinations and play with some of the background stamps I don't use very often, but love having in my collection.

Since the design of these cards is all the same, I've done some things to make the process easier.  First, I use my favorite Lawn Fawn Outside In Stitched Rectangles die to cut the card panels to size so I know they're all rectilinear.  Second, I took the sentiment stamp off of its wood block so I could use a stamp positioning tool with it, and rather than putting it on cling foam right away, which is a sticky business at the best of times, I'm trying out a Purple Onion Clear Mounting Stamp instead.  Lastly, I set up the mounting stamp and the sentiment stamp in my Mini MISTI and played with the placement until I knew it was right.  I'm going to leave the stamp in place until I'm done with this series.

Here's a look at all of the cards so far, starting with the first two you've seen before:

Top Row:  L - My Favorite Things Marble Background; Colors - Tattered Rose, Abandoned Coral, Seedless Preserves; R - Simon Says Stamp Circle Doodle Background; Colors - Shabby Shutters, Peacock Feathers, Faded Jeans

Row 2:  L - Hero Arts Ocean Waves Bold Prints; Colors - Weathered Wood, Stormy Sky, Faded Jeans; R - My Favorite Things Balloon Strings Background; Colors - Cracked Pistachio, Broken China, Faded Jeans

Row 3:  L - Technique Junkies Sudsy Stuff; Colors - Antique Linen, Tumbled Glass, Broken China; R - Impression Obsession Cover-a-Card Fluff; Colors - Iced Spruce, Peeled Paint, Chipped Sapphire

Row 4:  L - My Favorite Things Radiating Half Tone Background; Colors - Wild Honey, Picked Raspberry, Seedless Preserves;  R - Hero Arts Pearl Strings Bold Prints; Colors - Milled Lavender, Victorian Velvet, Aged Mahogany

It's fun to see them all together!  So far, in each group, two the first time, and three each of the other times, I've been surprised at which is my favorite.  Click on each picture for a closer look.  Which do you like best so far??

Tomorrow - Spring Multiples

CoronaCrafts - Day 8

I got a bit stuck in my card-making yesterday.  Over the weekend, before I got distracted by the coffee and tea shop dies I wrote about yesterday, I started two cards, and came to a stopping point on both of them for different reasons.  I mean, I will finish them, but I have to figure out how, and that feeling of not knowing how to get out of the rut was starting to take over, combined with that feeling of dread that if I don't make a card, and don't send it, I'll have nothing to blog about, nothing to post in Instagram, and by skipping one day I will get out of the habit of sending and writing and I will have failed miserably.

I'm tired of this disruption to my life, can you tell?

I took a deep breath.

And I tried to remember what the heck I was trying to do with this project to begin with - send cards to friends I can't see right now, use bits of things cluttering up my craft table, and try out some ideas and use products I've been meaning to forever.  Oh, and it's Woodblock Wednesday coming up.

As I'm very slowly unmounting my woodblock stamps, and incorporating all of my cling stamps into my main catalog, I have occasion to look through my stamp drawers, which I love doing.  I was getting out another stamp when I found this one by Stampers Anonymous: 

I have no idea when I got it.  I don't think I've ever used it.  I know this font is one of my favorites (what is it called?  do you know???), and I'm drawn to every stamp that uses it.  As soon as I saw it, I knew it was perfect for my CoronaCrafts cards.

I went for simplicity, and the original tenets of the project.  I pulled out a bunch of background stamps I've been wanting to use, dug out the notebook pages where I'd jotted down some of the Distress Oxide combos I wanted to try, and diecut a bunch of panels.  Here are my first two cards in the series:

 

Top:  Background - My Favorite Things Marble Background; Colors - Tattered Rose, Abandoned Coral, Seedless Preserves

Bottom:  Background - Simon Says Stamp Circle Doodle Background; Colors - Shabby Shutters, Peacock Feathers, Faded Jeans

When I make more of these in the next day or so, I'm going to use the technique from the top card:  Ink the panel, and then stamp the background stamp using the lightest color from the background.  Because the ink has pigment qualities as well as dye ink properties, the light color will stay visible on top of the darker shades.  Unexpected!  I think it makes a better, subtler backdrop for the words.

And I had no idea until I told my husband about these cards that this phrase is really a paraphrased quote from Tolkein.

Tomorrow:  Super-quick cards!

CoronaCrafts - Day 6

Of all the Tim Holtz Distress Oxide combos, there's one I return to over and over:  Antique Linen, Victorian Velvet, and Seedless Preserves (okay, anything with Seedless Preserves works for me.  You see the background color of this blog, right?).  Here are a few different cards I've made in the past few years with that set of colors:

Image:  Tim Holtz Cityscapes

Tim Holtz Floral Layering Stencil; Sentiment:  Altenew Signature Words

Images:  Oxford Impressions Jane Austen Collection

Today's card using that color combo came out of a day of exploration with watercolor block printing.  I love this technique for simple one-layer cards, and often stamp botanical silhouette images over the color blocks.  This card is a little more involved.

I'd made the print, stamped Hero Arts' Small Newspaper Skyline (retired), and trimmed it down to size a long time ago.   I loved it mounted on black, but wanted to add some interest to the background.  I thought about adding a background stamp to the back panel for a subtle tone-on-tone look, but instead went for Cuttlebug's Old Paris embossing folder (also retired) to add some texture. But when I put the two pieces together, something was still off.  I had a scrap of glitter paper lying around that was in the right color family, so I added that to the bottom.  I liked how the glitter paper broke up the monotony of black in the background, but adding it threw the balance off.  But, like magic, adding the sentiment from Miss Ink's Decaf Background set, fixed everything.

Tomorrow we stay in the city and celebrate café life, which we'll someday be allowed to have again.