Save the square steps corner pocket punch!

WARNING - If you're tired of reading about this punch and the medallion please stop reading now and come back tomorrow for a post that I promise will have nothing to do with square steps. Really!

So tonight I met with a demo friend to help her out at a Girls Night Out event at a nearby club. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to either of us, the event was canceled (bad event organizer, bad!) but we made the best of the situation by heading to a nearby restaurant to grab a bite and chat. Of course the discussion quickly turned to the retirement list and I bemoaned the fact that I was going to lose my beloved square steps corner pocket punch to retirement (and, by the way, as of tonight the punch is sold out, so if you don't already own it, it's too late to get it -- sorry!). Well my friend, who is a member of SUDSOL, an on-line demonstrator group, told me that some ladies there are encouraging other demos to call SU to save the punch just because they like the medallion.

My first though, of course, was "how cool would that be?", replaced almost immediately with "SU will never reverse a retirement decision." To be completely honest, I did e-mail SU to express my disappointment at the retirement of this punch, but I figured I was the only one. However, now that I know there are other people out there who are also pulling for this punch, I'm starting to think that maybe we can get SU to reverse this decision and maybe place the punch on the dormant list, to triumphantly return like a Phoenix rising from the ashes in the January catalog? After all, isn't that what happened with the in-color stitched grosgrain ribbon? It was going to be discontinued after the expiration of the holiday mini until a call-in and write-in campaign made SU reconsider.

So tonight I'm here to thank the members of SUDSOL who are trying to save this punch, and I'm asking everyone else who wants to have this punch available again to call or e-mail Stampin' Up! and make your request known. Customers can e-mail Stampin' Up! at marketing@stampinup.com or call at 1-800-STAMP UP (1-800-782-6797). Demonstrators can e-mail or call demonstrator support. Thanks in advance for taking the time to do this. SU really does listed to customers and demonstrators, so if enough of us make the call or take the time to write a quick e-mail, we may just become agents of change and the square steps corner punch may be saved!

As a thank you to you all I stamped what may very well be my last square steps medallion card. I used the retiring going gray card stock for the card base and certainly celery card stock for the mat. I stamped a piece of whisper white card stock with itty bitty backgrounds in certainly celery and the soon to be retired cool Caribbean.

On another piece of whisper white I stamped the note image in certainly celery, and punched it out with the 1 3/4" circle punch. I adhered it to a mat of cool Caribbean punched with the 1 3/8" circle punch.

I then made two medallions (you can see the tutorial here), one out of a 2.25" square piece of cool Caribbean and the other out of a 2" square of notations double sided designer paper, which will also retire at the end of June. I used Cambria's technique to weave a strip of certainly celery through the cool Caribbean medallion (see her tutorial here) and adhered the Notations double sided designer paper on top. (You can see that this paper was the inspiration for the color scheme of this card). I mounted the circle with the main image in the center of the Notations medallion with a dimensional.

For the cool Caribbean corners I simply took a 1.5" square of cool Caribbean card stock and punched it in two corners, then cut it on a diagonal. I inserted these corners onto the white piece of card stock and mounted the whole piece onto the certainly celery mat. I then added the medallion strip and the card was done. It's a cute little card and I hope it will serve as a token of my gratitude to everyone out there who tries to save our punch. Thank You!