Mom, Love Birds and Coffee

It is still March, and I am still working on those scraps. The past two evenings I've managed to create the following:

This one. This one has a history. Like the paper? Well let me tell you a little story. One year, many years ago, I found a pair of shoes (when I still wore suits to work ... this would not happen now ...), and the thing about these shoes was they were a funky color. Not grey, and not taupe, but kinda both. I thought they'd be perfect to wear with my grey suit and my taupe suit. The problem was: they looked grey with my taupe suit and taupe with my grey suit, so they actually went with nothing.

Why do I tell you this? Because I have had this paper for at least 4 years, because it goes with nothing. No matter what I pair it with, it does not 'go'. The paper is really quite pretty, and it has a linen-like pattern to it (go ahead and click on it to zoom in ... I'll wait ... ... ... ...) Okay, so this time I layered it with a piece of that stack o'red papers I have, just to give it a little bit of contrast, since the Sahara Sand is so neutral. The red made the patterned paper look green and I was afraid it would scream "Christmas", so I labored to draw out another color. I tried a ton of different greens, but nothing 'goes' with it. See? What a royal pain this paper has been all these years. So I got over the red and made the sentiment layer red, too. What did I have to lose? Then it really looked like Christmas. To counteract that effect, I added a really tiny pink ribbon. There is pink in the paper, but I could not match it, either. I made two of these then gave it a rest.

Remember this paper? I thought I'd give it another try. I did sacrifice a piece of PTI Spring Moss for the base, as it went really well and none of my SU papers looked right. Everything else is from The Heap, though. I wanted the birds to be the stars, so I tried to do a simple sentiment. I started with 'love' from SU's Wonderful Words set, but the white was shouting at me, and I tried to tone it down ... I tried. The bird image is from the SU Branched Out set and is stamped three times with PTI's Spring Moss. I even used the SAMJ to line them up.

I actually stamped birds on both sides of the 'love', but it looked stoopid, so took out some brown satin ribbon from my stash and tied a real bow (as opposed to just a knot) in an attempt to hide them, and it sorta worked. No one will ever know, right? You can kinda see one of their little tails sticking out... And dontcha love that Lattice border punch? Oh, yeah!

Last night I tackled this pile of stuff. I have had this piece of coffee paper cut and paired with Close to Cocoa pieces for about a year now. I took a bunch of Naturals White pieces, some browns, and I stamped some coffee sentiments on some Naturals White scraps, cut them out, then started to contemplate my decision. I was going nuts, but I am also sick of these papers, so they really needed to finally become cards.

I made three of these, and used another foot of the ribbon I have, bringing me down to about 3,994 feet to go.

I made three of these. The ribbon is some taupe dotted ribbon from my stash, and I just liked the little loops sticking out like that. Must be the sleep deprivation affecting my grey matter, but the dotted ribbon looked dumb wrapped all the way around the piece, and you know I needed to get it onto the card somehow!

Lastly we have my favorite card of the lot. This card uses three strips of the paper that were left from cutting all the other pieces from the original 12x12 piece. After I stuck them down to the brown layer, I decided this card needed special treatment. I even initiated my A Muse set of coffee-themed stamps. This is my second try, as I totally screwed up the first one. It stamped fine, but I blew the Nestie-cutting part, so I started over.

The cool thing about clear stamps is you can cut the card stock shape first, and then stamp things where you want them. I love that! So I cut both shapes, then stamped the images so they fit. I used Copics to color the dots on the cup and coffee, and to shade the table, and popped the white layer up so I could slip (all together now) the ribbon in between the pieces.

I'll bag and tag these guys, then break into something else tonight. Thanks for stopping by!