My Great Challenge

3 Blind Mice challenged some of us to create our most ambitious card yet. I had LOTS of fun ideas, but I went with this one after a couple of failed attempts. (I haven't given up on those other ideas, but I was racing with the clock since I was very pregnant at the time!)

Dolly Dingle is a paper doll created by Grace Gebbie in 1913. I decided to do a paper doll because I wanted to create an interactive card. Dolly came with three different outfits which were stored in "drawers" on the back of the card.

Dolly and her clothes are stamped in black and colored with chalks. Using the chalks like this was also a challenge for me, but I really like this look. I think the chalks make it look vintage.

I ended up carving a whopping six stamps for this card! Talk about a challenge.

P.S. If you're on my auto-send list, you'll get a card similar to Dolly soon.

Too Pregnant to Care LTCs

I made this card for the SAT Words swap, and I used my favorite word, defenestrate. I'm always threatening to defenestrate things. :o) I used a new technique on this card. With a notecard and my trusty hobby knife, I made a "stencil" out of this stamp and used the stencil to emboss just the window pieces in clear. I *think* the window pieces look like glass. That's what I was shooting for. This card may be hard to understand unless you were in the St. Simons Tree Spirits swap. I asked four people to help me carve the five St. Simons Tree Spirits, and I am going to plant the stamps in St. Simons, GA this fall. Of course, we all made some LTCs with our stamps first. I feel like I "forced" this card, though. I never got the inspiration I was waiting on, and I wanted to get the card done early, just in case the baby came early. The result is that I'm not happy with this card, but I can't tell you why. I tried to make my tree spirit card look like a tree and the ocean, but you really have to use your imagination to see both, I think.

Oh . . . I couldn't find any gray ink, so I used yet another new technique on this card. I used a watermark stamp pad and gray chalks to get the color I wanted. That was really fun to do.

I actually carved this stamp over a year ago, and it was my best by far at that time. I carved this for Shoafster's 2007 Jesse Tree PLB ring, and it finally came home in June of 2008, so I made this simple little card. The stamp is actually much bigger than this, but I got all of the important elements on the card. Goliath's shield got cut off, and about 2/3 of the army on the hill is missing.