Still here...

Hello Stamp Friends!

Please excuse my long absence from blogging. It's been a very busy few months for me.  I knew I wanted to attend the Stampin' Up! Convention this year for the 25th Anniversary Celebration, but didn't want to use any of the money that could be used for a family vacation. I was pretty determined to go and had to be creative on how I would pay for it. Once the retired list came out, I pulled out everything and went through and decided what I had to keep and what I could sell. I did eBay sales for 3 months. I also helped a friend with hers and she insisted I keep 1/2 of her profits, since I wrote all of the descriptions, weighed everything and did all of the trips to the post office, The eBay sales paid for my hotel, my convention fee and gave me plenty of spending money. I wound up getting my airline ticket for a big discount, due to the rewards points I had accumulated with my credit card. It couldn't have worked out better for me. 

The eBay sales took up so much time. I was literally working on listings every spare moment I had. My boys take karate and they have Wi-Fi there. I was even working on stuff while they took their classes. My plan was to wrap up the sales by the end of June, so I could start working on swaps. At the beginning of June, I got a request from my god-daughter asking if I could make her baby shower invites. I asked her when she needed them. She said her shower was the 10th of August. Though the timing wasn't good, I surely couldn't say no to my god-daughter:) She had a couple requests. One was she wanted the theme to be monkeys, (but she didn't know what the baby's sex would be for another 2 weeks) and she hates pink! She asked me if I could do purple. I remembered that I had a paper stack that had Wisteria Wonder in it, so I pulled it out. I had previously made a baby shower invite for my sister-in-law that was a pocket card, so I sent my god-daughter a picture of it and she liked the style of card, so I went from there. Here's what I came up with:

Supplies Used:

Stamps: Fox & Friends & Letter It

Paper: Wisteria Wonder. Whisper White & 2011-2013 Retired In-Color DSP Paper Stack

Ink: Wisteria Wonder & Soft Suede

Other: Big Shot, Perfect Polka Dots EF, Wisteria Wonder 3/8" Ruffled Ribbon, Punches (1 1/4" circle, 1 3/4" Scallop Circle, 3 1/16" corner rounder), 1/2" circle from new Circles Collection framelits, Crop-A-Dile, and I needed a really tiny flower to work with this really petite monkey! My smallest Stampin' Up! punch was way too big, so I was able to find this on-line. 

She loved it! The insert pull was made by attaching the two layers, then punching the 1 1/4" circle, scoring it in half and attaching it to the top of the layers using sticky strip. Then I used the Crop-A-Dile to punch the hole and added the ribbon. I didn't go into detail on how the card was made. It's pretty self explanatory, but please feel free to ask questions you may have. 

Would you believe I made 47 of them and had them in the mail the Saturday before I left for the Convention. I had started my swaps while waiting for Chelsea to find out the sex of her baby. I was able to get 38 done, but hoped to do at least one more Halloween Swap.

Please come back tomorrow to see my Convention swaps:) I'm so happy to say that Blogger's app for the iPad has improved. This post was so much easier to do than my past posts. I am aware that my photo is a little on the dark side, since I took it with the iPad.  I will have to work on that, but I use to scan my cards. The pictures came out beautiful, but doing that each and every time I wanted to share something took forever and I would often rebel against it and not share things at all. I'm feeling really great about this new way, so please be patient with me as I'm still learning.

I hope you are enjoying your weekend and I look forward to sharing more with you:)