Before I babble about my card today I’d like to chat about an ongoing project – a painfully drawn out and unpleasant project… (and there’s blog candy if you can make it to the end of this post)

There is a great thread on SCS at the moment about purging your stash of paper crafting supplies.  I was hoping to purge a lot of stuff before moving to my new craft room so I wouldn’t be bringing the clutter with me but the room was done in stages (we’re in the final stage now…) and my supplies were brought down in bits and pieces.  As a result, it was more important to tuck things out of the way than it was to have a proper place for everything.

The result is that I’ve hardly purged any of the outdated/unused/unloved items in my stash and I’m feeling a little overwhelmed at the thought of going through EVERYTHING so my room can be fully functional.

However, today I spent HOURS moving the contents of my old craft room closet to my new closet.  It took lots of trips and some quailty time sitting on the floor going through bags, boxes, bins, etc. (my back will be killing me in the morning!)  I wish I’d tossed more than I did but I’ve made a good first attempt at sorting my craft supplies. (note: I don’t just papercraft – the majority of stuff in my closet is for other crafts)

Here’s a picture:

The top two shelves are for my cross stitching and general crafting, then there are two shelves for paper crafting stuff (kept in photo boxes – two are empty) and another shelf of containers for altering/gift giving.  My chipboard and paper are on the bottom shelf and my coil binding machine and boxes of coils are on the floor of the closet (the purple sewing box to the left is actually the majority of my cross stitching supplies)

I’ve been crafting for about 20 years so I have quite a collection of “stuff”.  I did put a dozen unopened tubes of tulip fabric paint, older stamps, punches, ribbon, etc. in a “Give” pile and will take that to work tomorrow and give it to the children of my most creative co-worker.  There are also stickers, paper, glitter, sequins, my card boss (an expensive toy I HAD to have when I first started making cards) and a lot of odds and ends throw in.  It’s only one bulging shopping bag worth of things though so there is room for improvement.

I’ll quickly share today’s card and then tell you about my blog candy…

I mentioned last week that I got my first Greeting Farm stamps.  One of them is “Ebony” (but we all know it’s Alice from Twilight) and I managed to squeeze in some time colouring her in and creating a card in between the horrible closet project.  This is what I came up with:

I used some paper I bought at M’s last summer (it’s good paper for teen cards but is a bit thinner than I like to work with – I think it’s MAMBI.  I thought the skulls would tie in nicely with Alice’s shirt and I used the pink colour in the paper as the springboard for my colour choices.

Alice’s face is done with Copics.  The hairband and skirt are paper pieced and I glittered the icon on her shirt.  I used my newest Nestie shape to die cut the image and I thought it would be fun to stitch around the edges of the paper.  I think it turned out quite cute!

On to my blog candy…while I am giving away the majority of my purged items to a friend, I did keep a few things to give away on my blog (I’ll be having a giveaway every day that I post this week).  I stuck with things that weren’t too heavy to mail to the winner.  Today’s goodies are a selection of Making Memories ribbon.  I did use a little bit of the purple ribbon but I think everything else is the full length indicated on the packages.

All you have to do to be entered is leave a comment.  It can be about anything (but keep it clean, please!).  Oh, and check back tomorrow because I’ll have another prize.

The sun has managed to shine just a little bit today so I thought I’d take another go at blogging my craft room.  At this point it’s just a couple of shots of the room.  There are still a few things to do (which I will point out on this tour) but I’ve been using the room since late January. 

Picture 1 – This is the view of my room from the door.  The colour is still off – if you want to know what it really looks like you’ll have to find the paint chip – it’s Asparagus by Behr.  We’ve used the same colour in our living room and bedroom as the windows on our house (except for the basement, ironically) face East/West and we don’t get much direct sun so the rooms are a little dark.

In the above picture, the bank of Jetmax cubes where my Cuttlebug and Tonic trimmer live will eventually be covered with another countertop.  There will be a bookshelf running along the back for extra storage.  I’m hoping to have that done by mid-April but I’m not holding my breath!

Picture 2

This is the view from the other side of the room.  You can see that we have a wall of closets.  The smaller closet is for my craft stuff (and still needs to have shelving installed – for now there’s a plastic shelf in there but it isn’t an efficient use of the space so “real” shelves are next on the list of things that need doing.)  The larger closet is for household storage and doesn’t have any shelving in it at the moment.  We’ll store board games, seasonal items, etc. in that closet.  There are also no handles on the doors at this point.  We are sourcing some longer screws so we can use some small metal knobs that we already own. (this project was a huge budget suck – it took longer and cost much more than we had anticipated – the room was previously part of the unfinished basement)

Note that my trimmer doesn’t quite fit on top of the Jetmax cubes.  The countertop will add an additional 10 inches to the depth and will also make for a more durable work area.

Eventually, our elliptical machine will have to live in here as well (boo hoo) but maybe it will inspire me to use it. (ha!)

Picture 3 – This is the main event.  My desktop is a 10 foot countertop with Jetmax cubes as pedestals.  My computer is on one side of the work top and my crafting area is on the other.  I still have to get my Cricut set up in here but there’s no room at the moment (DH is going to put in a shelf for my printer and I’ll put the cricut where the printer was)  The cost of finishing this room in the basement was pretty steep  so we spent as little as possible to outfit the room.  I already had all these cubes (I have 12 in total.  My old room had 9 and I got 3 for my birthday last year but didn’t assemble them because I knew I’d be moving downstairs within a month or so) and the filing cabinet.

The only things that are new (i.e. weren’t used in my old room) are the wall mounted magazine holder (where I keep my cricut cartridges and my SU ink cubes) and the white desk organizer that is on top of the filing cabinet (both were birthday gifts back in December) - oh, and the trash can is new too!  

The black filing cabinet holds my SU cardstock.  It’s filed alphabetically, rather than by colour family.  The In Colour cardstock is filed by year except for the first year or two and is kept in the bottom drawer along with CS from other companies and SU neutrals

In the cubbyhole under the desk, you’ll see some Rubbermaid organizers.  The majority of my 12X12 patterned paper is kept there and is filed by brand.  It needs some culling – which I do several times a year.  I give away a fair bit of paper and keep some of the outdated stuff for making envelopes or practicing a 3-D project.  My SU markers are also kept in this cubbyhole – they’re in the tin my Prismacolour pencils came with.  I just grab the tin and put it on my desk when I want to use my markers.  It keeps them stored horizontally and makes it easy to tuck them out of the way when I’m not using them.

I would have to take a lot more pictures to show you how I organize things.  I like to have my everyday stuff close at hand (thus the messy looking shelf on that wall unit) and to tuck away things that I use less often or that take up too much space.  My clear stamps, acrylic blocks, reinkers, and adhesives are all in the Jetmax cubes under the countertop.  Less used items are either in the bottom drawer, over in the bank of Jetmax cubes or boxed up in photo boxes and placed in the closet (I put all my seasonal things in photoboxes and store them away until I am going to use them).

Picture 4 – this is where “everything else” lives.

I use my paper cutter, scor-it and Cuttlebug over on top of the bank of Jetmax Cubes rather than dragging them over to the work top.  It’s a bit awkward at the moment but when I get my second countertop I’ll have it overhang the cubes slightly to give my knees a little space.

All my smaller than 12X12″ paper lives over here too.  There’s a magazine holder in one of the cubes that I use to store my Basic Grey (and other brands) 6X6″ paper – I have a label on the spine of each package and store them alphabetically.  Any scraps are placed back inside the package so I know where they are next time I use that pad. (I do the same thing with the 12X12″ paper – just throw the scraps back in the drawer on top of everything else.)

I keep my Nestabilities dies in a small photo box on one of the shelves in the cube.  I just throw them all in the box.  It’s not a perfect solution but it will do for now.  I don’t have a lot of Nesties – I carefully select the shapes I want (except for the first 2 sets I bought…they were new back then so I got EVERY plain and scalloped circle and did the same for the rectangles – now I just get the largest set)

All my glitter is stored here too…it’s all in a wooden tray I got at the dollar store – very easy to grab the tray, select the glitter I want and then put the tray back on the shelf.

There is a lot of cardstock and paper stored in these cubes as well.  I have some Bazzil CS, some cheap CS from Costco (I use it to experiment with templates, etc so I don’t waste the expensive paper), watercolour paper, vellum, photo paper, and a few 12X12 pads (as well as a small stack of 8×8″ pads (I have a LOT of paper) all tucked away in there somewhere.

Once the room is finished (new countertop, shelving in closets, elliptical in place, etc.)  I’ll probably put a few ornamental items in here.  It doesn’t really bother me if there are any pictures on the walls – the room is more for function – but I’m sure it will become a little more cluttered as time goes by.

Hope you liked the tour! (oh, and it’s not always this tidy…but that’s another post!)

Today’s card is inspired by some new Cosmo Cricket paper that I recently bought online.  When I saw this particular sheet of paper I instantly thought of an SU hostess stamp that I have – not sure if it’s seen ink before. (hey, they’re free when you buy a butt-load of SU stuff…I’m not obligated to use them!)

I think I coloured this three times before I was happy with it.  You can only do so much with a solid green image.

I used my new Pixie on this card.  In fact, this was the first card I used it on. (I tried the machine with some scrap paper first)  The shade of blue that I matted the paper and the image on were chosen because the machine comes with some weird colours of thread.  The threaded colour is yellow but they kindly throw in a spool of turquoise and a spool of orange…interesting.

As mentioned yesterday, you can’t use standard spools of thread on the Pixie so I was stuck using one of the colours it came with to take it for a spin.  Yellow was probably the obvious choice but I went for the turquoise.

Here’s the final product:

My peas were stamped twice and pop-dotted on top of the image.  I made a couple of custom “dew drops” and made a bit of a strange bow – I just couldn’t get a nice bow tied so I tied a knot and added a second piece of ribbon for a little more “pouf”.

I tried a few colours of cardstock to go with the green and Cool Caribbean.  Kraft was the winner.  I am surprised at how much I like this combo.

I was going to share some pictures of my craft room but the weather has been quite dull and the colours are too washed out in my shots.  I’ll have to try again on a nicer day…but here’s a little tease (colours are a little off):

…but no time to sleep!

I do have things to share but no time to take pictures and blog about them at the moment.  I’m just dropping in to state that I’m still alive and to exclaim quite cheerfully that our new boxspring and mattress were delivered tonight. (plus some over-priced pillows that we got free at Sears when we bought the bed)

The spots in the picture are because I used my flash – I hope!

New bedroom furniture is next on the wishlist…well that plus a bathroom reno, new kitchen, my own car, etc.  Perhaps I’ll settle for a new duvet cover and window curtains. (the headboard and bedding in the pic is the same old, same old, it’s just the mattress and foundation – and pillows! - that are new.)

I’m dying to go to bed early to see if the mattress is worth the $$$.  However, Christmas cards and customer orders await so time to break out the cuttlebug and ATG gun.

Leave it to me to choose a Christmas colour scheme that just isn’t happening in St. John’s – I’m into the “funky” green with gold.  Gold, no problem, the green – a sort of peridot green…- a much bigger problem.

Because we moved our Christmas tree to the recroom we installed over the summer, we had to buy some new decorations for the living room to prevent family and friends from thinking we are total scrooges. (partially true but only in a bah, humbug sort of way – we dig the giving and getting of gifts though!)  We decided on a small table-top tree ($13 at Walmart) and gold and green decorations as noted above.  The walls are a funky green so we didn’t want to use a traditional green as the accent colour.  So began my dilemma.

I managed to score 9 green bulbs at Zellers of all places (in packs of 6 – 3 green and 3 gold) so there was enough of a pop of green for the mini (3.5 foot) tree.  The gold is just going to have to carry the rest of the room.  I’m sure the colour will become more popular next year but for now we’ll limp along with the little we have.

My only disappointment was that I planned on putting ornaments in a cool footed bowl/candle holder that we purchased at Pier 1.  My table runner is gold so I was relying on the green as a contrast.   You can’t get blood from a stone (or a turnip!) so I was planning on “sucking it up” and just using gold ornaments.  When shopping for the ornaments for the bowl we decided to go with smaller ornaments and a nice fat candle in the centre instead of filling the whole bowl with ornaments.   Nice, but a bit monocromatic.

Yesterday, while working on yet another Christmas project, I realized I had some Martha Stewart glitter in a similar colour to the ornaments I wanted (the colour is a cross between golden beryl and heliodor if you own the MS glitter).  I also had a few tiny styrofoam balls from a Christmas ornament project that were the same size as the decorations that are already tucked inside the vase.  I covered the balls with some glitter and scattered them around the bowl.  I now have my colour pop and here’s what it looks like:

It’s kind of hard to see the contrast in the picture but it is noticable in real life and I’m thrilled that I was able to find a solution in time for the holidays.

Here’s a larger picture – the background is blurry because I used the macro setting but you can see the contrast a little better:

We’re waiting until Christmas Eve to light the candle as we are having company over – I hope this looks nice in candlelight.

Check back tomorrow for some personalized ornaments.