LOVING Stampin' Up!

Let me start by saying I've been a pretty shoddy blogger.  I started this whole thing so people can look at what I'm doing with SU!, and then I didn't really do much with it.  Leave it to my very bestest friend to tell me that she posted the link to this site on her FB page.  Now I guess I have to keep it up.

The first round of open houses was great.  It was great to see the different styles that emerged from everyone.  No one copied my card exactly, so I guess the creative juices were flowing - yay!

I received my starter package last week and have been madly crafting pretty much every day since then.  Okay, not pretty much.  Every day.  And night.  And afternoon.  Actually, it's completely taken over my life.  I didn't even leave my crafting room all day on Saturday other than to use the bathroom, and to make tea.  I rush home from work so I can get back in here.  When I'm lying in bed at night trying to sleep, new layouts and colour combinations fill my head.  It's a little ridiculous to be honest.

As soon as I remember to get some batteries for my camera (or steal them out of one my husband's remotes) I'll post some pictures of a few things that I've been working on.

UPDATE:  I am in LOVE with this ribbon technique.  This was a piece of flat 5/8" ribbon, about 12" long.  Basically, you cut down into the middle of the ribbon (on the short side) about 1/4", and try and separate about 3 of the threads.  Then you pull these and smush the rest of the ribbon down until it starts to bunch up.  Then you smush it down some more, and keep pulling.  If you google "scrunchy ribbon" you can find some videos to show you how to do this (I'm not that hard core into blogging - yet). This makes your cards look really fancy with relatively little work.  It takes a few tries to get good at it, and sometimes you pull threads that just don't want to work for you, but keep at it.  The result is well worth the work.

For this card I used the "Always" stamp set for the bird as well as the backgrounds on both pieces of matting, Perfect Plum ink and cardstock, and Very Vanilla cardstock and ribbon.  To texture the paper I used the square lattice texture plate.

Somewhere on here I will post a calendar of sorts to let people know when my next club will be.  I'm running 2 right now, but they're both full, so I guess it's time to start a new one.  If you're interested in joining on, please email me and let me know.  Then I can figure out what day of the week works best and blah blah blah.

Happy stamping for now!