Tuesday, January 19, 2010

A Series of Unfortunate Events

Some days when I stamp everything seems to fall in place. The colors look great, the stamping is clean, the cuts are straight. Other days nothing works. When making the card from the last post I smudged the sentiment when I stamped it. I flipped the card over figuring I could cover the inside with another piece of paper. But... I got it crooked this time. As I was really trying to do a one layer card for that design, I set the messed up card aside, got out my Stamp-a-ma-jig (which I should have done in the first place) and stamped another card.


The next day the messed up first card was still on my stamping table. I hate to waste anything so I thought I would see what I could do with it. I had planned to make a window card using the little squirrel from Love Bandit so I set to work to see if I could salvage this card base.

The Full Heart punch just fit over the smudged sentiment so I punched that out. So far so good - I could add a pretty paper behind and cover the second crooked stamping attempt.


I added the patterned paper. Stamped and cut out the squirrel. Used the stamp-a-ma-jig and got the sentiment perfectly to the right of the heart cut out and.... touched the bottom of the heart with inky fingers and made a mess. I tried rubbing it out, blotting with a wet sponge - nothing worked. (I was in no mood to take another picture or I would show you the disaster.)

So I found another piece of patterned paper, positioned it where I wanted it, traced the heart to get the placement right and punched it out. Thankfully, by this time I was beginning to like the changes. I added little dots to each scallop, moved the sentiment to another position, added the ribbon and heart and was actually happy with this in the end! All this to save a piece of cardstock - sometimes mistakes do work out well.




Here is the inside view of the card.




When I do not have ribbon to match a project, I often use this trick. Run the thin end of a coordinating color of marker along the edge of white grosgrain ribbon. Instant striped ribbon.



1 comment:

  1. Love how your story went. It happens so often to me I just figure there are no mistakes in crafting, just new ideas. Some of them even turn out as well as yours. I wanted to thank you for your kind comments about my card, and about my "Evil Cat" (he bit me this morning because I gave him three pets, and I guess he only wanted two. Small bite, but it is why he is known as "The Evil Cat" every once in a while. Right now he's sleeping on my left foot, and I'm trying to move it. Dangerous plan, maybe I'll just sit a while longer.

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