I Am Irrational

Day 2 of my 5-day weekend, and I am still being amazingly semi-productive. Today I emptied the three unpacked SU shipment boxes cluttering my Living Room floor, put everything away, and broke down the boxes. CRAZY, I KNOW!

It's another glorious day weather-wise, so all the doors and windows are open again, and it's quite breezy inside, too. Finally! We had July in May, so now we get May in July. Whatever ... as long as we get it!

As I opened a window in the Captain's Quarters, I spied a pretty piece of patterned paper in my stack, so I stopped everything and used it to make this card:


I think the green or red might have been a better choice for the die-cut shape, but those shades looked too Christmas-y to me, so I went with the blue.

Then I took one of the Geisha girls I've been working on ... oh, yeah, I haven't told you about these little girls yet, have I? I'm sorry this is so long, but it gives you a good feel for how quickly I lose my grip and the situation spins dizzy-ing-ly out of control. This happens on a regular basis... no surprise there.

This all started when someone asked me to make three images of these little ladies with different colors of kimono, but not pink. Actually, she asked me months ago for these images, and being so pathetically behind, I am just now getting to them. So anyway, I started stamping and fell into my usual thought process of, "Hmmm, if I'm making three, I might as well make six. Or eight. Whoa, I've stamped five of this image but only four of the other one. One more of this one ... no, wait, that's now six and four. Oh, wrong image ... let's stamp another one. Doh! Mis-stamp, try again. Oh, now I need four of this third image. No, wait, I need five. No, six. Oh, let's stamp an extra one, what the heck." And so it goes, and I end up with a bazillion images to color and make into something.

What? Just throw away a few? What? Lalalalala ... I ... can't ... hear... you....

Backgrounds. I needed backgrounds. I went into the closet and pulled out my stack of Fat Quarters. A few years ago, I was in Fat Quarters mode, and no, I don't quilt. I inexplicably started going to fabric stores, though, and I bought just about every Fat Quarter I saw that had a gold thread running through the design. I even ironed them and I store them flat on a shelf. They are covered by a stack of mailing bubble envelopes, but I know they live there.

So I pulled out a few non-pink fabrics and cut off strips to use as backgrounds. I figured out how many background pieces I could get out of each strip, then went in search of colored card stock to coordinate with each fabric.

Based on the number of fabric rectangles, I stamped the kimono section of the images onto the colored card stock. You may notice there are too many numbers in this story. You see, the number of fabric rectangles I could get out of the strips of fabric had absolutely no bearing on the number of images I'd stamped. So as I started trimming the kimonos, I realized I had more girls than kimonos, and it didn't match the number of fabric pieces. So I stamped some more girls. Then I had to stamp a few more kimonos. Then I had to die-cut the girls.

I eventually ended up with the correct number, but it was a way larger number than three, which is all I ever really needed to make in the first place. Welcome to my world.

I decided to cut ovals out of some SU Brushed Gold card stock I have, and I layered everything together, then I colored the girls' faces with my E000 Copic. I know - Geisha girls wear a white paste-y make-up, but these are little girls dressing up like Geisha, so I gave them a healthy glow. Because I can.

Now the fabric. I showed you last night how I pulled the threads to "square" the edges. I made more than three, remember, so this took me FOR-EV-ER. Did I stop? Nope. Did I come up with a better plan? Nope. I did them ... all of them. I ended up with this stack I showed you last night:

Today my friend selected the three she wants, and I'm making cards out of the rest of them. This is what I ended up with:

Yeah, I know a gold layer would look better behind the fabric, but I ran out of Brushed Gold card stock, and even though I placed two orders yesterday, neither one included more Brushed Gold card stock. Go figure.

A second reason I went with this design is because I have several packages of Class-A-Peel stick-on words. I love these things! I used to use them all the time until I started collecting sentiment stamps. I thought the gold ones would look FABBY on these cards.

Also, if you look real close, you can see where I went over her hair pins and the front edge of her kimono with a gold gel pen. I also went back and did her collar with a white gel pen.

So now if you'll excuse me, I have about 15 more of these to assemble. I hope to get them done in time for tomorrow's farmers market. I hope tomorrow we have another day of this weather! OMG, would THAT be amazing!

Thanks for stopping by!