Overextended

Please note: I caught an error in the numbers of 1.5" lengths you need in the text I typed last night. You actually need three 1.5" lengths, not 6. Sorry!

So last night I promised that today I would stamp something new. No problem, I thought. I knew I had a meeting of the Friends of the Library but I honestly thought it would run short and I would still have a little time to stamp. No such luck! Instead of coming home early I got home 1/2 hour late, so there was no way I was going to have time to think up a whole new card. Luckily I looked up the color challenge on SCS this morning (always artichoke and groovy guava) so that part was done. But I had no idea what to do for a layout. So I decided to do a super simple love note. These 3x3 cards are small enough not to require too much fussing, especially this one! I just grabbed a scrap of the always artichoke and cut it down to a 6x3" size. I added a 2.75" scrap of groovy guava prints double sided designer paper. I grabbed a scrap of whisper white (I don't even know what size it is -- it just looked right on the card) and stamped the flower from the Year after year set in basic brown. I grabbed my aqua painter and added in always artichoke and groovy guava to the flower image. then I edged the image in always artichoke ink, added the word window tabs and gold brads, and popped the image onto the love not with dimensionals. I then stamped the "thanks so much" sentiment from So many Sayings and the card was done!

Wanna know the coolest part? Stamping the sentiment was easy because last weekend I finally decided that I was going to take the plunge and mount each line of sayings and images from the So Many Sayings hostess set separately.

Almost from the moment demonstrators first got a preview of this hostess set they were trying to figure out if it was better to leave the set in 3 large stamps or to cut and mount each line apart. Initially I was in the "keep in together" corner, since I like using the stamp-a-ma-jig and markers. But then I started hearing about everyone's mounting ideas -- on jenga blocks, on dominoes and on square dowels -- and I realized that this really made a lot more sense. So when we went to Home Depot this weekend to check out paint, I purchased two 3/8" square dowels. Each dowel was 36 inches long and cost $0.89. Bill cut them down for me to the various sizes I needed and then I used my craft and rubber scissors to cut the stamps into lines and mount them on the dowel pieces. I LOVE the way these turned out and I know that I will be using these stamps much more often than I would have had I tried to keep the three stamps together, especially since they're absolutely the perfect size for love notes!

You can see the index side of each dowel here. In case you want to do this too, I found that I needed 5 pieces that were 1.25" in length, 3 (not 6, see note above) pieces that were 1.5" in length, and the rest that were 1 7/8" in length. What I especially love about this mounting method was that every block fit into the box and the dowels were cheap! How nice is it to get a 34 piece stamp set for less than $2.00 and still have 3 nice wood blocks left over to use for other stamps (maybe those unmounted stamps I received in a goody bag at a shoebox swap this spring?)

So there you go. Hope this helps some of you who were still struggling with this decision. See you tomorrow!

Oh yeah, one other thing. It looks as though with the exception of a few minor glitches Feedblitz is performing its function all right, so for now I'll just leave it in place as my subscription service. But Adrian asked a question in her response to my Feedblitz query that I would like to address. I have both the e-mail service and the feed service set up to broadcast only the beginning of each post. I know that some people dislike this, as they do not like to have to actually click on a blog to read the article. But I sort of look at it as a quid pro quo. I like to see who's reading the blog, something I don't get if you're merely reading an article in your e-mail or through blogger. So I write the articles and make the projects and post them here and subscribers have an option. If they want to see the full posts, they need to "visit" my blog. If not, that's perfectly OK too (I'll never know -- LOL!).

I deliberately don't have a lot of bells and whistles on the blog and I don't run any outside ads, so a visit here shouldn't be too time consuming or offensive. But that "click," which registers in my site meter and gives me feedback about where my readers are coming from and what they're reading, is the "payment" that I ask for in return for seeing the full text and photos of my posts. I know I'm unusual in doing this and it probably costs me some readers, but I guess I hope that at least some of my silly posts are worth it.