A Milestone and Some Grad Cards

Lookie at what happened today:

Yeppers! The Miata turned over 150,000 miles. And yes, I endangered my life to take this photo. No, not really. I pulled over onto the shoulder of the road, as I was not on the beltway yet. I have the 100,000 mile photo, too, which I took in 2002 on a trip to Ohio, and I pulled over to get that one, too.

Do you notice something funky here? Yeah, the '5' did not turn all the way. Drat. Was it because the dial had JUST turned and had not settled in yet?

Nope. Double-drat! Now this is going to bug me for 9,987 more miles. Sigh ...

Let's move on to the creative portion of our show. Tonight I decided to make some new Graduation cards for my markets. In my new MO of alternately making one project from the stash and one using new stuff, I needed to use stash tonight.

The idea for these cards came straight from this post on Jenn Balcer's blog. Love it! And I mentally decided to totally CASE her idea, but using my own goods. Lessee, I have an only-used-once A Muse set of dotted letters; I have a never-inked Rosie's Roadshow graduation cap; I have two pieces of graduation paper I bought at Angela's one or two trips ago; and I have two Scrap Heaps. Let's see what came out, shall we?

First up was this piece of paper that I cut into 6 pieces. I layered it on black, and planned to put it onto a white card base.

I lined up the letters on my grid paper, then picked them all up together with my acrylic block. For words, this is the ONLY way I will ever get them even close to straight! After I stamped the word onto white, I went back and stamped the hat onto the 'g'. Kinda neat looking!

I cut out the white with a Long Rectangle Nestie, then hand-cut a red layer for it. I selected a bare spot in the patterned paper to place the 'grad', and put a piece of black down first, then popped the red layer with Dimensionals.

Of course, it needed ribbon, and I knew just the one I wanted to use. The more I looked at it, the more the edge looked like really dark navy blue and not black, but I declared it black and used it anyway. I figured if it was that close, no one else would notice. I thought the ribbon looked a little lonely, so I made it a little bed of a strip of back card stock.

Personal note: I am pathetic. I have no (zero, zip, zilch, nada, bubkis) black card stock in my cabinet! How could this happen!? I have extra of EVERYthing, just in case. Aaaaugh! Fortunately, I rummaged in The Heap and found enough scraps to make all the layers, but geeeeeeez. And I just placed a Demo order, mostly to replenish all my running-low colors, but you know what? I missed the completely EMPTY black card stock slot. Grrrrrrrrrr..............

Moving on ...

This is the second Grad card I made. One piece of paper cut into three pieces and some sad mis-cuts. (I'll need to come up with something creative to make with the poor dears.) This one is basically the same parts as the first one, but I used plain red ribbon in place of the edged one.

Allow me to share with you a simple trick I use so I can see a white card on my white grid paper.

See? It's difficult to, um, see where the white card base ends and the grid paper begins. I am forever messing up my layering and I hose a lot of white card stock.

So I put the white card base on a piece of colored card stock so it is much easier to put the black layer on the white card base! And since I never put anything away, I always have a piece of something laying around I can use for contrast.

Once again I have blabbered until bed time. I'll go bag and tag the Grad cards for Saturday's market, then clean up a bit. (Gotta keep those remaining black scraps safe, you know, until I can order some more.) Tomorrow I'll get to play with more new stuff. Yay!

Thanks for stopping by!