A Catalog Gives Its Life For Art

Let me begin tonight's post with a peek into my Day Job cubicle ... my "home away from home", if you will. Being the irreverent type, that attitude follows me to work (surprise!), and I do weird things. Like this:

Meet: The Trough. I used to have just a ceramic bowl (made by yours truly, but that's another show), but I got tired of refilling it several times a day, so I bought a trough, aka: cat feeder. I simply dump in several bags at a time, and refill once or twice a week.

The handsome plastic spoon, stolen appropriated from the cafeteria, is my lame attempt to get people to stop grabbing individual beans from the trough, and it works, mostly. We've gone through several spoons over the years ... they get a lot of use. Some people even open the top of the trough and dig in. I've talked about getting a ladle, and no one has discouraged me. This is bad. This is real bad.

Meet: The Filling. This box arrived today. I buy a case of ten 2-lb bags of Belly Flops (Jelly Belly seconds, and half the price) at a time. Why? Because it's cheaper than buying the bags individually, that's why! Yes, I buy them out of my own pocket. Yes, people give me money now and then. No, it does not cover even a fraction of what I spend. The guy next to me actually pays me to please stop buying more, but I still buy them, and he still eats them. People ask me, as they scoop the little gems into their palms, if we are going to take a break any time soon, to which I respond, "Nay! Forsooth! HAHAHAHAHA! NO!" I mean, if you think *I* whine here, just imagine what I heard the last time we "took a break"! "What? How long? When will we start up again? Can I pay you to start up again? Order them myself? How much for you to start buying them again?"

See? Much easier to just keep them coming. They pay me to WORK, you know, not to ward off jelly bean fanatics, even if I was the party responsible for hooking them in the first place. (My work here is done.)

Okay, okay, on to tonight's catalog massacre. I got this idea from a combination of (1) Lydia's Project Reanimate, where she re-uses one thing to make another, and (2) some cards I saw posted on SCS for a sketch challenge. One person did a card with a bunch of butterflies and simple sentiment, and I thought I might combine the two.

I have a Harry & David catalog I was about to toss the other day, and there are some terrific pics on those pages. Like these:

Part of the petits fours page. Lotsa pastels here.

Some cool packaging.

Lotsa fruit. Yummy-looking, juicy fruit.

So I tore out the pages that intrigued me, grabbed my MS butterfly punch, and set to work. When I was finished, I had 15 piles of 6 butterflies, and here is what I made with them:

These were punched from a picture of a basket. Pretty neat, huh?

The sentiment is from PTI, and it is stamped in Memento London Fog, which is gray, but a little on the blue side. I used it for all the cards, even if they had no gray or blue in them. That might have been a boo-boo on my part, but oh well.

This is the one from the page of cherries. Really!

See? You can even see the water spots and the different spots where the lighting was.

And this one is from a page of stacked packages.

I made 15 of them, and 13 survived as saleable... I managed to mis-stamp the sentiment on two of them, but I may save the corner of the 'bad' cards and use them as a part for larger ones.

I plan to sell these as single cards, as my sets of cards don't sell much, and sometimes people like smaller, single cards like this. (All my single City Cards are gone!) I'll let you know how this plan works out.

That's all for this evening. Thanks for stopping by!