I love each and every one of my readers (except that guy who keeps leaving spam comments about gross stuff, but he’s probably a bot and doesn’t read my posts anyway.) and I would like to see you at my new old home, my formerly neglected personal art blog. I will be stamping, doing mixed media and trying to make half way decent girl faces at Crafty Blogger.

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Since she’s making impressions in clay beads, it doesn’t matter that the polymer clay doesn’t have a lot of give. If you plan to use a polymer stamp for making an inked image, I’d put a few layers of something that has a bit of give under the paper you’re stamping on to.

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I completely agree. Self editing is a very important skill, whether you are making a mixed media collage or a greeting card. I have liberally used gesso to cover many failed experiments.

However, don’t be too quick to decide your experiments have failed. I was planning to pitch some Valentine’s Day cards that I considered a hideous experiment gone wrong and my sister convinced me to give selling them a shot. They sold before anything else because they were very different from traditional Valentine’s Day cards.

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I have some boring stamps. They’re big shapes with blank middles and they don’t add much sparkle to cards and collage pieces. Well, while I was looking at this blah foam star stamp the other day, I realized that one of my carved stamps would make a cute pattern on it.

Instead of stamping the star on the paper and then inking and stamping my carved pattern stamp on the image, I decided to stamp the pattern stamp directly on the inked star stamp. The result is softer and more cohesive. I had a ton of fun playing around with this technique.

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I love cook outs, so I was excited about this month’s Lifestyle channel’s theme day - Some Like It Hot. I created a sunny, bright invitation that would work for any summer celebration.

The words are rub ons by Imagination Project. (This brand goes on easy and really sticks well.) The daisies are vintage trim, but I’ve seen similar trim in the fabric store recently. I used a white card blank and adhered a piece of yellow cardstock to it. I stamped the daisy (by Posh Impressions) on white paper and colored it in. On the inside, I stamped an invitation stamp that turns your card into a simple fill in the blank invitation in seconds.

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I just received a copy of the delightful new Reflections Scrapbook Program to review. This book, by Jeanette R. Lynton, is designed to help you create great scrapbooking layouts fast. It is a wonderful tool for people like me. I get in a layout rut - title at the top, journaling bottom left, two to three photos staggered on the rest of the page. A quick glance at the different layout options and I want to do things differently.

I really liked the way the book has a quick reference guide for all the layout options. It is nice to see all the different ways I can put a page together with one glance and the fact that there are no photos or themed papers to distract me keeps me from overlooking the perfect layout idea for a sea related page because the example page is an ode to the cow.

However, I also enjoyed flipping through all the finished layouts and seeing the embellishments and papers used.

My final opinion? This is a useful book for scrapbookers who want to create some variety in their layouts without spending eight hours a day on a single page. (By the way, I think some of these layouts will work really well for cards, too, and I’m going to give a few of them a try.)

You can find Reflections by visiting the Close to My Heart website and placing your order through a consultant.

Image by Amazon.com

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I am working on Christmas cards right now, so I’m thinking about holiday greetings:

We have a lot of popular sayings like “Jesus is the reason for the season.” and “May the spirit of Christmas live in your heart all year long.”

There’s the ever popular “Season’s greetings from our house to yours.” but I used it last year.

How about you? Any favorite holiday card sayings?

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I used this method to make the background on this Christmas card layout idea I’m working on:

The stamp is one I carved, but you can substitute any star shaped rubber stamp for a similar effect. I put a light coat of paint over a piece of sequin waste to create the stamped layer’s background. I’m thinking I’ll have to re-carve the stamp if I go with this option, since this one looks kind of like it is angry and wants to give someone a black eye.

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The problem is that color trends for clothing are usually a year or two ahead of home decor and craft trends. So, we might still be seeing a lot of pink this year. Or, we might be seeing more up to date vibrant jewel tones and metallics. Maybe cranberry red, vibrant orange and fern leaf green hues will carry the day.

Regardless, you should probably expect to see polka dots and stripes. I’m thinking deep red, metallic copper and dusty pink might be my Christmas 2008 palette, but I’m making cards for friends and family. If you are making products to sell, you may need to do some more research.

For people with deep pockets, The Trend Curve makes a yearly Tis the Season Christmas color forecast and their 2008 version is already on clearance. Looking at their product photo tells me I may not be too far off the mark. I see all of my color choices there.

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