A New Year, A New Challenge

I found myself with a few free moments on Saturday, so I decided to start going through the many boxes of 'things' in here and doing a little triage. One of the caches I found was a box (or two) of old workshop kits. Zip-top bags of card stock, all pre-cut for the workshop of the day. I've gotten smarter over time and now I cut the number of kits I need plus one, but in the past I usually rounded up to an even number...with 9 people coming I made 12. I had this dream that I'd make the extra cards myself ... some day. Well, some day never came, until now.

I have no recollection of the actual designs of these cards of workshops past, or even if I have the stamp sets any more. But I faithfully collected all the like stacks o'card stock and got rid of all the extra bags, etc. I have a huge (three years huge) collection of pre-cut card stock just ASKing to be formed into cards.

So my new self-challenge for the coming year is to use it all to make cards. A novel idea, I know, but just think about it: this stuff was paid for years ago, so anything I do with it will be FREE! Free is good! I decided to allow myself to use up embellishments from my stash, too, thus qualifying these as a stash-dive challenges, even though that is so "last year".

First up is this pile from one of my kits:

That's a 1/2 sheet of Ruby Red plus a 1/4 sheet of Ruby Red, a square of Close To Cocoa, a square of Naturals White and a square of Old Olive. I decided to give up on the 1/2 sheet of Ruby Red (I'll save it for later), but I used the rest of it to make this:

Recipe: Stamps: Garden Silhouettes, All Holidays; Card Stock - Ruby Red, Close To Cocoa, Naturals White, Old Olive; Ink - Choc Chip; Other - Old Olive and Ruby Red markers, Word Window punch, Vintage brads, Dimensionals, misc floral ribbon, misc brown gingham ribbon.

I figured since I almost always offer a pile o'scraps for my customers to use for sentiments or other small things for the cards, it would be okay for me to use a scrap for the sentiment. I added two pieces of Stash ribbon - done! A five-minute card! Ten minutes if you count the time it took me to hunt down the ribbon and retrieve the Word Window punch. If the rest of these go as well as this one, I might be done by March!

I'll keep working on these in between planning my projects for my January workshops and post as I get some more done. Off to create some more!