Weekend Marathon - Post #1

While most people will be traveling to be with family, or cleaning and cooking because your families are coming to you, I have a weekend of solitude planned. My family is in OH and MI, and years ago I explained that I have no desire to spend the whole weekend stuck in traffic (been there, done that), and maybe we should have a new family tradition in, say, January? Almost everyone in DC is from somewhere else, so literally 500,000+ people leave town this week, and they all come back on Sunday. One year we spent 2 hours trying to get through one of the toll booths on the PA Turnpike. I rest my case. So no one asks me to travel any more, and I have actually turned down several very generous local offers of shared family and friends, because I need a long, uninterrupted string of days to get some stuff done around here.

My big plans for the weekend include a little cooking (if I feel like it); a little paperwork (I am 11 months into my 12-month FSA thing and I have no idea if I have any money left or not); a little more paperwork (I am 11 months into a 12-month year of selling cards and holding workshops, and I have no idea if I am in the red or the black); I need to widen the paths in The Other Room; I need to recycle the pile o'boxes in the Kitchen; I need to make the Buckeyes (like the donut guy on TV says, "Time to make the donuts.", it's "time to make the buckeyes" at this time of year. And that last item actually requires several table-tops to lay out the dipped buckeyes to cool, so I'll need to either clear off one of my scrap tables (HAHAHAHAHA!) or set up another table in the Kitchen like I did last year. I'll be sure to show you a picture of that effort once I get it going.

So since I have a boatload of things to accomplish, and since I figure I'll get to about half of them, I think I'll do a little stampin' in between to, you know, get a break, and I'll post on my progress as the weekend progresses.

Let us begin with a little tale of the sorry scraps. It all started, innocently enough, with this poor die-cut shape:



(Yeah, it's fuzzy, so get over it.) I demonstrated to one of my customers in a Good/Bad Demo Moment how the SU Top Note Die works so well in the Cuttlebug. It was Bad, because I was using the Cuttlebug, but it was Good, because I was showing her she could use the die in the machine she already had (and yes, she bought one!). So anyway, this was just sitting on the table, so I wanted to use it up.

Also sitting on the table was a piece of 2-sided patterned paper from The Scrap Heap, so I cut two of the Top Note die shapes out of it, giving me these:

Since they 'go together', I wanted to try piecing part of one in the middle of the other, then I started cutting, and matching, and, well, it was going badly. But I persevered! In this next shot, you can see where I was going with the papers:

See? Badly. You can also see some relics of stamp days past. Remember the hammer and eyelet setter from the pre-Crop-o-dile days? I needed to use them because the spot I wanted to set the eyelets was too far in for my punch to reach. Those oval eyelets, by the way, are from old SU stash. Yay, me!

So I finished the cards by tying some of the Basic Gray taffeta ribbon between the eyelets and calling it an evening. No, I have no plans to show you the finished cards, because I intensely dislike them.

Oh, and guess what's left over at the end of the night? This:

Sigh.


I think I'll call it a night and turn in. Gotta rest up for the long weekend, you know!

PS: Lauren, do you mean this?