This is what 211 cards looks like. I made 214, but I gave 3 away already lol. I made these during the 8 week Pro Scrapbookers League (TM) at Club Scrap. There was one woman on my team who made 400 cards in the last week alone. Color me impressed!! It was a nice competition in that we were all in awe of the woman who made 400, but the contest was about doing what we could do and no one was made to feel badly for their contributions.

The two main criteria were that at least 50% Club Scrap elements had to be used and the cards had to be good enough for the maker to sign their name to and give to family and friends. There was a different challenge each week ranging from using stencils to art mediums. But for me, a dyed-in-the-wool process person, to make that much product left me feeling like I had met my personal goal. It gave me a chance to make my own cards but without the time to overthink every element. During the last week I didn't even go to my usual online haunts lol.

Some of the cards will be boxed as gifts, some of them will be boxed as donations to a few organizations that need cards, and some I'll be keeping for future use.

Ohhh I'm not dead yet, I can dance and I can sing, I am not dead yet I can do the Highland fling..

Monty Pythons fans and Spamalot fans will recognize the song. Last week I was focused on making cards for the competition (our team won btw). Then I pinched a nerve that runs from shoulder to fingertip (I'm owing a lot as I type). Then I got a cold, which seems to be hovering on the brink of bronchitis. I had hoped to post the pile of cards I made during the last 8 weeks, but it seems it will have to wait. I can do a very very tiny highland fling, but it's better than nothing lol.

Introducing Neptune

Neptune is settling in nicely. He followed a trail of food up the ramp to his food dish. He is very industrious and works for many hours a night on his wheel. I wish I could think of something to harness the wheel to. He's still relatively small, only 4 inches.

Positive and Negative

The backgrounds are from a very old cut I made on DS before the laptop died. It's made from one cut and two pages of the same paper. The positive cut is glued on one paper. I used painters tape to remove the negative and turn it over to apply glue to the back of it. You can also use the positive image to make a pattern by lightly tracing a pencil as a guide for gluing the negative. To get the full effect, the border of the image has to go over the "cutting" line.

The image I used is from page 37 in Storybook using the accent/frame feature. The seventh image in the third row. The "Positive" title is the base cut from the Opposites Attract cartridge. The shadow was made by making a second cut in a darker paper and gluing the lighter slightly above and to the left of the darker. Rhinestones bling up the i's. The "negative" title is the trapezoid feature in Opposites Attract cartridge. I glued the letters on top of the lighter paper used for positive and cut the shadow to fit.

The journalling is on vellum (not seen here) about how the same thing can be positive and negative. I haven't figured out how I'm going to attach the vellum yet. On the one hand it's done, on the other hand it's not lol.

We have the sounds of little feet in the house again.

I've had one of the best birthday weeks ever (and I've had a few to compare this one with lol), and yesterday my DD gave me a new hamster. Here it is 5:31am and there is a soft whirring of the hamster wheel. Hamsters are exempt from our alphabetic pet naming system, and this little boy is named Neptune. I will take pictures later when he has settled. One thing I've notice right is he just eats the food instead of carrying it away in his pouch. Color me a little older, but happy : ).

Variations in Coloring

I love to play with variations. I used a Club Scrap stamp from Nature's Wonders with pigment ink and black embossing powder and heat set the image. Then I used some watercolor pencils and colored the green parts of the stamp and used blue to color the background. A sidenote, I bought these watercolor pencils in 1979ish and they still work beautifully.

In the top card, I used the color that brush picked to make a "frame" and then washed the rest across the inside. In the second card, I used a little more pencil, but after making the "frame" I didn't wash the color across the entire mat.

In the third card I did the same thing as the first, but then I took a craft knife and cut away part of the image and slid a small mat with a sentiment from Henna behind the cut.

In the fourth card, I just added the Henna sentiment directly to the Nature's Wonders colored image. Thank goodness for unmounted images and acrylic stamping blocks. It made it so easy to get the sentiment close to the flowers.

Today is Your Day!

A very simple card using all Club Scrap materials. I loved the dr. seuss quote, last week was his birthday, and the colors reminded me of those used in his books. I used a balloon stencil from the Club Scrap Jubilee kit, and the sentiment is from the Down to Earth kit. The balloon is tied with a piece of sewing thread that is only attached to the card where it is tied to the balloon.