Scrap Stash Saturday!

Added at 12:34pm: I am wondering if anyone else is experiencing problems with Google Reader this morning? I am not getting any updated feeds for any of the blogs I read.....not a one! Please email me if the same thing is happening to you!

Good Morning!

Well, I'm finally getting my bearings in check after being gone for so long. The bad news is I haven't stamped yet! Boo-hoo! Too much stuff left to do around here. The laundry pile doesn't seem to be getting any smaller...how does that happen?

Since I haven't been able to stamp since I've gotten home, I'll show you a card I made using scraps right just before I left. As you can see by the card, I used my new My Favorite Things birthday stamps! I think I'm really going to love this set, even though I haven't played with it too much yet.

You all know I'm a glutton for paper piecing, I went to the max on this one and paper pieced the birthday cake image! Not for the faint of heart, I must tell you. This isn't something you want to do if you've never tried this technique before!

Let's see if I remember how I started the whole paper piecing process for this card.....I think I first stamped the image on three different patterned scraps; the green floral paper, the cream/red floral paper, and finally, on the back of the pink polka dot paper you see here, which is the solid peachy/red color. Oh yeah, I guess I had to stamp the image on a piece of Very Vanilla cardstock as well. Whew. So, to clarify, the image was stamped on four different scraps of paper in total.

What I ended up doing is cutting the background out of the green floral paper and piecing it onto the image that was stamped on the Very Vanilla. I cut around the dress and the cake, and the arms, leaving the candles only. Next I cut the dress out of the cream/red paper and adhered that to the Very Vanilla image. The dress was cut into two separate pieces.

Next, I cut the cake and the polka dots out of the peachy/red paper and glued them onto the dress. The "icing" on the cake was cut from the cream/red paper and glued on. Finally, the whole paper pieced image was matted on a piece of Basic Black cardstock.

I have to be honest and tell you this was a lot of work! Probably too much to consider mass producing the card. But, I really wanted to try something fun and different, and this idea fit the bill. I'm so happy with how it turned out. I had tried making a card with this stamp set a few times before I did this card, but with not much success. Like I said in an earlier post, I think I get a creative block with new stamps that prevents me from being able to successfully pump out a card right away. I had first tried coloring the image with my aquapainter, but didn't have much luck with that. Then I tried a few other ideas, but they didn't work either. I'm considering getting a few Copic markers to try out. Does anyone know where I can find some? Does Micheal's or Joann's sell them? I think I'll try coloring the MFT stamp image this morning with my Prisma pencils to see if I have some better luck. Otherwise, I'll probably be paper piecing again:)!!!!



I'll leave you today with a few more pics from camp. The first pic is of our whole "group". These are the people we've been hanging with at camp for at least five years now. The second pic is a group shot of just the kids.....I'm showing you this one because it was such an ordeal as you can tell from the picture! These kids have such a blast together every year together, and this photo op was no exception! Getting them to stand still and all smile at the same time was difficult because they were being so silly. I've got a series of these shots as they were falling down from hanging on each other! I wish I had enough room to show you all of them!