What's in Your Special Drawer??

Often I get in a creative rut and forget about some of the fun items that I have picked up over the years. My pages and cards all start to look about the same with minimal variations. One of the great ways that I find to boost my creativity is to sit down and just start stamping images, or cutting a variety of die cut designs with no real plan in mind. This was the beginning of the “cat on the fence” card.

I had a stash of die cuts and sat down determined to use some of them. This fun Tim Holtz "On The Edge" fence die and the cloud punch got me to thinking. I can make a fence, add some flowers, maybe some stickers and – wait a minute, what about the drawer with the brads and eyelets. I have cats, frogs, stars, sock monkeys, and dots of all colors. I have a tiny bag of paper flowers to hold those pastel flower brads. It was definitely a case for out of sight out of mind.

 

 

Lawn Fawn and Hero Arts have out some great stamp / die cut sets. For those of you like me who find trimming tiny designs tedious, this is a great answer. I tried both stamping first and cutting first with fairly equal success. I love the look of a nicely trimmed image and this makes it so easy. By stamping my birds in color, all I had to do was attach them at a saucy angle to some pretty pink paisley paper that has a touch of blue in the design. I added a pop dot under the middle of the line to give the birds some dimension. Scraphappy has several such sets to get you started.

I saw a card with the gate opening in a magazine and remembered classes where I had made such cards. Now it seems mine were all the same. Just cutting the card stock vertically or using a gate fold adds such a spark of fun. Then I remembered that I still had a couple of pink ribbon die cuts from a class at Scraphappy, and the card was complete.

So dig into your special stash, pick up a new die cut, buy a craft magazine, pull out the brads and eyelets that you are saving for a special occasion and see what you can get started.