Five New Cards Done

Well the weather report was almost right on for the weekend, warmer temperatures with more snow and freezing rain but not as much as they thought there would be. Of six of our closest neighbours, all with garages, only one of them put the cars in the garage so they had to scrape windows this morning. Time to clean out those garages neighbours! Unfortunately the temperature is dropping again and the lower studio (aka the basement) is like a freezer today. I absolutely could not work down there late in the afternoon. I did go down this morning and cleaned up my crafting table – shock!

I have a couple new followers – welcome! Just a reminder that if you are looking for a certain crafting project, just go to LABELS and click on what ever you are interested in and Blogger will kindly pull up just those posts.

Before I tell you what happened yesterday I need to let the new readers know that I have two rare brain disorders (trigeminal neuralgia and hemi-facial paralysis) with the cause so rare the neurosurgeon had never seen it before in over 30 years of doing surgery. The surgery helped but, let’s just say, my brain is now wired a little differently and certain things will cause spasms and speech problems. My speech can vary from a southern drawl (when this happens when I’m with my quilting friends they rename me and call me Savannah), to a stutter, to adding 20 or 30 syllables to the end of a sentence, to sounding like I’m impaired (and I don’t’ drink) to many other weird speech patterns. Those are the common ones. We’ve lived with this for over 15 years so it’s just part of our life now and we decided to find the humour in it, instead of wallowing in self pity…let’s face it, lots of people are worse off than I am!

So, yesterday, because of the change of temperature and low atmospheric pressure, the weird speech pattern started. Now usually, one speech pattern will appear and last for a few hours to a day or so but yesterday was a new one. Almost every sentence came out with a different pattern. It was bizarre to say the least. One time when I was having a day similar to this Joe left the room and came back with the fire extinguisher and when I asked him what that was for he said, “You are wired so differently today I’m afraid you might spontaneously combust I should be ready to put you out.” Some days he is so funny and that was funny. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, “No use crying over your troubles…all that does is get them wet!” Today the speech was a little off but nothing like yesterday! I obviously don’t leave the house when I’m that bad.

So, although I had the weird speech pattern yesterday the pain was not too bad so I headed down to the lower studio to get some cards made. I needed more sympathy cards. I seldom make two cards that same but I’ve turned that corner a bit and I made several cards using the same technique and stamp. Here are the first five I made.

The cream coloured background cardstock came embossed. It was part of a package I picked up with other things at the thrift store but when I got home I realized they were not cards and envelopes, but a single piece for a RSVP and envelope. Ooops. They sat for awhile and then I decided I had to use them up. So this is what I did.

The background was made with water colour paint. No fancy expensive water colour paint either. Just the ones you can buy for around $10.00 at Michaels – I used a coupon and get 40% off) and I bought one plain water colour set and one with a shimmer built in. These cards were made with just pain water colour. Just wet the cardstock in the middle and then drop in the water colour paint off a paint brush. The paint will flow only to where the paper is wet so that’s how I got that irregular border. Water colour paint dries lighter. Once they were dry I used some Distress Ink, Mustard Seed, to fill in some areas that needed a little extra colour. Some didn’t need any ink, some did. I also splattered some paint after everything was dry. I like how that ties everything in.

Then I stamped the image – Stampin’ Up set Serene Silhouette (I love this stamp set and so glad I bought it.) - in black Archival ink and then the sentiment (HOTP). This was then mounted on a cream card base. I still have the envelopes that came with these single pieces of embossed cardstock but I couldn’t use them with these cards because once I glued them to the cream card base, they were too small. I’m going to be using them by making some smaller cards. I normally just buy the Recollection cards and envelopes from Michaels but I’m on a mission to use up all the bits and pieces I have. I really, really like how these five cards turned out. I’ll post the others on another day using a different stamp from the same set. I actually made 16 cards yesterday afternoon. I was on a roll!!!

This was a long post….sorry about that…….That’s it for a Monday,…..keep smiling….

Cheers

Violet