I haven’t made a card in quite a while. Not by my choice. Life has intruded.
My mother is seriously ill, so I have been spending many of my evenings with her, just being with her, and also running errands.
Work has been harsh this last month or so; we hag a big initiative at work which required all hands — and I do mean all hands — on deck, but which has now been successfully completed. But beyond that, these last couple weeks were just really rough — almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong — a fire alarm, a leak in the roof, angry customers, you name it. Came home pretty exhausted every night, which is my usual crafting time.
On the weekends, I have been devoting myself to my other creative pursuit, fiction writing. I am preparing a novel I wrote to publish with Amazon for the Kindle. And I had a short story published in a paperback anthology of urban fantasy called Dirty Magick: New Orleans — here’s the link! Ha-ha! Self-promotion! If you are interested at all, my writing is blog is here — Atlantis Falling. I will add it to the sidebar.
But today I had some down time, and I finally made a card! Still going to try working with all my patterned paper stacks. The stack I’m using now is from a company called “Craft Smith” and the stack is called “Pattern Medley.” A color scheme of royal blue, olive green, pink and turquoise, with a sort of Indian, paisley pattern vocabulary, and a lot of silver foiling.
The first page of the stack was a very elaborate, decorated, foiled all-over pattern. Looking at it, wondering what to do with it, I saw after a bit that it was kind of mirror-imaged, and could be cut easily into quadrants. I did that, took one quadrant, fussy-cut to one part of the pattern, and mounted that one a card. Again, I went with my favorite technique of pairing bright colors with kraft cardstock:
The color repro is a little off on this pic — it’s brighter than that — but I like the way it highlights the silver foil. I also like the unexpectedly craftsy composition, with the paintbrushes on the top right corner balanced by the cord-wrapped hot glue gun in the lower left. Good thing for photo cropping!
The sentiment is embossed with Wow! Ultra High Silver powder. It got a little ragged on the “thanks,” but this was actually the better of the two attempts I made, and you can def still read it, so I’m good with it.
It’s just nice to be able to play with my crafts supplies. I should make more time for it. It’s so relaxing. It’s like a kind of meditation — while I’m making a piece, my mind doesn’t go anywhere else. It’s wholly focused, and I can forget my troubles for a little while. Not that I really have that many troubles, really my life is pretty chill, but you know.
