Reverse Creativity

My normal process of designing a card starts with a general idea I want to communicate, followed by a search for pictures, embellishments, and quotes to represent that theme. Too often, I end up printing out an entire collage sheet for just one picture. While attempting to organize my craft supplies this past week, I decided I had way to many pictures just gathering dust. So I decided to change my thinking process and started designing some cards in reverse. I found a picture that I totally loved, but had no idea what to do with. I mounted it on coordinating scrapbook paper and textured card, then I found an appropriate quote. So far, so good, but it definately needed to be embellished. A search through my supplies found some great additions to the theme, and Voila... Here's the results of my reverse creativity! It was a fun personal challenge to take an object, in this case the picture of the dancer, and force myself to develop it into a beautiful and unique creation.

Guy Cards

My guess would be that about 70% of handmade cards can be sent only to a woman, maybe 25% can be sent to either sex, and only about 5% are made specifically with the man in mind. Today I'd like to share with you a few of my favorite "guy cards." Sometimes it's quite a challenge to design cards for the men, but they're really quite fun and you can use themes that you just can't use on a woman's card. Think about sports, fishing, TV (I recommend the Three Stooges!), motorcycles, cars, etc. as themes and make sure to use a suitable color scheme. Stay away from flowers and cutesy animals. Old vintage photos are great to use. Just don't be afraid to try something "completely different". The guys will love you for it.

Storing Your Unmounted Stamps

I love my unmounted stamps, and tried every storage solution I could think of that wouldn't cost a fortune. This is my method for storage and I think it works great. I take old CD holders (you can also buy them rather cheaply at a computer supply store) and remove the inside plastic that holds the CD. The unmounted stamps then lay perfectly inside. You can store them in a CD tower or stick them in a drawer. You can see exactly what is in each plastic cassette. Another tip: if you don't know how to make unmounteds stick to your acrylic block, just use Aleene's TACK-IT and you can stick and remove all you want. When you're done stamping, stick it back in its plastic holder. I don't even use a foam backing for my stamps. I just do my stamping on a computer mouse pad. It doesn't matter if the foam is between the stamp and the block, or on the bottom... it works the same way.