Cards, Swaps and a Tour

I have been a bit slower posting because it's back to school time. I have some cards and the packaging of my cruise swaps and even a tour of my craft room (while it's mostly clean). For the last week I have been in my classroom cleaning and organizing there; maybe I will inlcude a tour of it one day.  On my last day of freedom, I accomplished one of my summer goals: I finished the monster quilt top and backing. It's off to the shop for quilting because it's too big for me to enjoy doing on my home machine--it's 110 in square. I can't show you yet; it's a Christmas present. 

These are two of the cards I made using the blended background stamping. Directions are on the Stamping page. I like this style card. The base of the card is the underneath and the flap is only the area of the background/message with an additional paper inside for the message.

Next I have my last ATC design for the cruise swap. I rubbed and spritzed straw, lipstick and concord on a craft sheet and dragged the tag and string through to blend the colors. A key charm from my stash (and Jan's) was tied to the string. The stamped images are mostly from Tim's designs. I accented the heart with stickles for a bit of bling and the crown is a Tim die cut design cut from grunge board that I "rusted." To do this you apply embossing ink to the grunge and emboss with distress powder (vintage photo). After rubbing off the discharge crystals apply distress ink. I think I used rust (or maybe vintage photo).  

 I used a Holtz stamp design for the labels on the back of all my ATCs; computer generated the info, stamped complimentary images from my collection and blended the edges with distress ink.

 I packaged the charms in a little matchbook style box. (I am concerned that the flip-flop beads will break in transit.) Basically this is made from the directions for the nugget box from splitcoaststampers and edited for size. I attached the charms to tags that I made from paint chips. I used the slit punch and a small circle to hang the lobster claw. I stamped palm trees on clear acetate with stazon for the wrap around.








Next is the tour of my mostly cleaned craft room-minus members of the "Stampin Cult" that are often present.

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Our next 'cult' project is designing group tee-shirts using a technique that Anita learned from a class several years ago. I loved my first shirt and was sad when it didn't fit anymore (but not sad about loosing all the weight)