I am so grateful for my crafting. It truly helps to keep me sane. As sane as I get, at least. That’s my brief Thanksgiving thought. I am thankful for my life, in general, but I am very thankful for my creative abilities, even if I don’t take the time to work with, work on or express myself using many of them. I have so many drawings in my head that haven’t made it to paper yet. I do write down the ideas in as much detail as I can muster and as makes sense, though, so that when I do finally take some time to work on realizing them, I won’t have lost these concepts that are so precious to me. I refine them over time in my head, so my notes get updated when I new thoughts or visions float through my head.
But I digress. This post was not about drawings that exist only in my head. I did a little bit of crafting over Thanksgiving. Yes, that’s right. We went nowhere and did nothing. Honestly, that’s the way I like it (uh-huh, uh-huh). I use the Thanksgiving holiday as a time to relax, refresh and get prepared for the upcoming holidays. This year, I did a lot of sleeping. A lot. Which is unusual for me because I tend to get pretty sore if I don’t get out of bed within a reasonable amount of time (8 to 9 hours). I chalk it up to my body needing the rest. Whatever. It did start a bad cycle, though. Because I awoke later in the day, I would stay up later, then sleep in later, then wake up later, and on and on. It’s gotten quite ugly, actually. But I’m turning it around. It’s a good thing I do most of my work from home right now, so that I could get away with getting up later today. I don’t actually have to physically go into my office until Wednesday, so I still have another day to finish weaning myself back onto a more normal schedule.
But I digress. Again. I desperately need to clean up my craft room which, after having been nicely organized and cleaned a couple of weeks ago, looks like a paper crafting bomb went off in it. When I was making the paper bookmarks for Nan, I had all of my different materials out, including a bunch of rubber stamps, my drawer of embossing powders and my tower of scrapbooking paper. They all need to go back to their proper locations. However, in order for me to do that, I had to create a couple of corner bookmarks for myself. Because I really wanted to. I ended up doing four of them. They aren’t the greatest. I spent hours up in that room for two days and became totally lost in thought and then completely lost my creative vision. So they are kinda… meh, but they’re for me and I really don’t care that much. I had a horrible, terrible time trying to get accurate representations of these blasted bookmarks. I photographed them and the photos were bad. I scanned them and the scans were better, but I still spent time in Photoshop fiddling with every single little nuance of color and they still aren’t right, but they are close enough.
The Swarovski hotfix crystal on this one is actually a pale pink that matches the pink in the decorative paper.
I just could not get the coppery gold metal look of the paper strip in the center to show up correctly. Plus, I learned exactly how not affix hotfix Swarovski crystals. There are two different directions on the back of the box. One works and the other doesn’t.
This one is a great example of complete overkill. Too many different colors and textures. It’s pretty much a pastel explosion with a butterfly on top.
The paper at the top goes better with the maroon daisies than it appears. Honestly.
By the way, I’m not sure if I posted the link to the tutorial I used for this corner bookmarks before or not, but you can find it here. Splitcoaststampers.com totally rocks. If you stamp, you have to check it out. I find a lot of inspiration there and I know others do, too. Oh, and another thought for you on these corner bookmarks. A lot of people tend to go really nuts and bling these puppies out with a bunch of layers, pop-dots, ribbons with bows, etc. Keep in mind, though, that these are meant to be used. In books. So you don’t really want them to be terribly thick. The hotfix crystals were pushing it for me.
Of course, I can’t put the supplies away yet. I have yet to stamp the bag(s) that will hold all of Nan’s bookmarks. *sigh*
I have been stitching a little bit, as well. I’ll take some progress photos and post them later this week. The little Just Nan design for my mom is turning out great, even if I had to frog a section that I stitched in the wrong color when I first started it weeks and weeks ago, and I need to get back to stitching the second stitched bookmark for Nan. They will be here on the 17th, so I have about 2 weeks to stitch that one and then finish the back. Oh, and clean up the spare bedroom, which looks like a sewing bomb went off in it (there are thread and fabric scraps all over the floor from the purse-making adventure).
