A Box, An Owl, and Some Ice

Today is (was) the first day of another 5-day weekend. YAY! I got an early start, since I woke up before 5 am and my mind started to plan how to make a box to hold the 25 pig cards I'd made. Plus envelopes, but we'll get to them in a minute.

Here is what I ended up with, just so you know this tale does, indeed, have an ending:


As every good crafter knows, mostly from experience, you never start with the good papers. You always start with s-crap you don't care about (about which you don't care), so when you mess up and have to start over, you don't care. (See how this works?) So I started with a piece of printer paper and one of the 5x7 cards, and I designed a pocket. I then made two of them out of crap some 12x12 card stock I had stored on my Living Room table:

Here you can see I've constructed two pockets that neatly hold the 5x7 cards. But this is wrong. As soon as I tried to fold the thing closed, I realized I needed a wider spine, and since this was a 12x12 piece of card stock already, there was nothing left for me to do but cut and piece. I cut that baby right up the middle (that would be at the 6" point), split it apart, and affixed it to another piece of red card stock. Yeah, I make work for myself, but this was actually going in the right direction, so I kept going.

Once I had the mock-up done and all the measurement changes noted, I cut into the real card stock and made the whooooole thing. Here is a side view of the two pockets of the open folder:

You can sortof see the strip of card stock I used to cover the expanded spine. You see nothing of the seams that allowed this thing to be wide enough.

When the folder is closed, I needed a way to keep it that way, so I remembered to stick a piece of card stock to the base before I stuck on the right-hand pocket. That strip of card stock wraps around:

... and closes with a large Basic Grey magnet:

I've had those magnets for years, and it only took me about 30 minutes to find them. I put them away real good, I did. The chipboard button is from a pack of chipboard buttons I found in my homeless box of stuff, so I used one of them. The letters also came from the homeless crafts box.

I put a matching piece of card stock down the outside of the spine, just as an attempt to make it look finished and cut all that pink. (Did you know if you type loo instead of look, Blogger's spell-checker is okay with it?)


Then ... I went in search of envelopes to hold the 5x7 cards. Let me just say that the 2.5 hours I spent making this box (including the mock-up) was overshadowed by the 3 hours of driving around town in 100-degree heat with the car's a/c cranked up and me still sweating, stopping at no fewer than 5 different brick & mortar stores, only to come home with just a color wheel and three art erasers to show for my toil and trouble. There ARE no 5.25 x 7.25 envelopes anywhere that I can find. I did see some online at The Paper Source, but it's in DC, and the thought of driving an hour into DC (Georgetown, to be specific) with PARALLEL STREET PARKING and me with a manual transmission, and no - the Metro doesn't go there, well, I said Nuh-uh. I almost ordered them online, but shipping was as much as the envelopes.

But THEN I noticed there is a Paper Source in Annapolis, which, yes, is further away, though not all that much time-wise, now that I think about it ... but anyway, I have a scheduled tweet-up with one of my Tweeps on Tuesday. We're going to meet in St Michael's, on Maryland's Eastern Shore -- where right now it is 15 degrees cooler than it is here! -- for lunch on Tuesday, and I have to drive RIGHT PAST THE EXIT where this other Paper Source store is. KISMET, I say - it was in the cards, man. I'm getting my envelopes on Tuesday.

So I stayed in my air-conditioned condo and made this:

NEW STUFF!! I just love that owl. I have always liked River Rock with Black, and I hoarded River Rock when it retired, and I am SO HAPPY that it came back!!! (Hey, that rhymes!) I knew I wanted to somehow use the River Rock + Black, and I was looking for an accent color to liven it up a bit, and went for the new In Color: Poppy Parade. LOVE IT!

I punched the owl out of both a sheet of the new Neutrals DSP (River Rock DSP - HELLO!) and also Black. I also punched the eyes out of white and the heart out of Poppy. I like that the eyes and heart shapes, as well as the breast plate, are at the outer edge of the punch, as they are the shapes most likely to be punched out of a coordinating color, and you don't need to punch the whole owl with all the shapes this way.

A special message from our sponsor: Yes, Lydia, I did pinch myself with the punch, but only once. And yes, the pinched spot is still red. And sore. People - be vewy, vewy careful with this punch. It has a lot of work to do with all these shapes, and you have to press very hard. Watch the fleshy part of your hand... I'm just sayin'. Now back to our regular program ...

The ribbon on my card is Basic Black - a new Taffeta color, and the sentiment is from the new Just Believe stamp set. I punched the 'V' in the sentiment piece with the corner of a square punch.

I went a little nuts and ran the Top Note shape, the Large Oval behind the owl, and the breast plate piece through the Big Shot with one of SU's texture plates:

I think that totally dresses up this guy!

Now that I have that out of my system, I set my sights on tomorrow's market. If it's anything like today, it will be HOT HOT HOT and I will MELT MELT MELT. So I plan to bring frozen towels and iced coffee instead of hot coffee. Here's a tip I saw while blurfing the other day: freeze some coffee in ice cube trays and put it in your hot coffee. That way, when it melts, it doesn't water down your coffee. Clever, non?

So since I am a hoarder, guess what I have? A collection of silicone ice cube trays from a shopping frenzy at IKEA:

I also have a fish one. I got these originally for melting crayons, but I am busy hoarding my crayons, so there is nothing to melt. The poor things have been languishing in my bottom kitchen drawer, alone ... neglected. So I filled these babies with coffee and they are in the freezer getting nice and cold for tomorrow. Yay!

I also have a bottle of water in the fridge for the canines that come through, plus a new water bowl that looks like a water bowl and not just an old sour cream container. Every weekend is like this ... it's like packing for a mini trip. I also need to put my tent back in my car so it's out of here and I have room to set up for my classes on Sunday. I'll do that in the morning when it's only 85 degrees out. Ugh. *checks batteries for the fan*

That is all. I need to go get crafty some more. I have a LOT of new stuff that needs to meet some ink.

Thanks for stopping by!