Retired

No, I haven't retired.  As I told you in my last post, I recently started a new job and retirement is a long, long (far too long) ways away.


I'm referring to retired stamps.  I can't seem to let go of my favorite retired or just plain old stamps.  There are a number of reasons for this; first, I have a limited crafting budget and am very selective in what new materials I choose to spend on.  Secondly, when I was first introduced to stamping, I went a bit crazy and bought a lot (I mean a tremendous amount) of stamps.  Some of that rubber still hasn't seen ink!!!  The last and most important reason is that I'm sure a lot of you have those same retired stamps just waiting to be chosen for your next project.  Maybe seeing one of my cards or techniques will help you see your old stamp in a new way. 

So, here's an oldie but a goodie from SU's Classic Captions stamp set, and, yes, this is the first time I've created anything with this set. 

My friend Jane had a fall this week and broke her ankle.  She's doing fine, but I wanted to send her a card to cheer her day.  I started by stamping my image in a medium brown on Vanilla CS.  Of course, I wanted more dimension, so I stamped the image a second time in Chocolate Brown and cut out the lady and the caption separately and layered on the first stamped image with pop-dots.  This was then matted with Cocoa brown CS and then I cut a tag using my Cricut and added some flourishes with my Quikutz dies.  If you look closely, you can see I added some metallic accents to the flourishes with a copper metallic pen.  Distressed copper brads, gold ribbon and some Lollychop flowers were added as well.  The BG paper is from DCWV.

I have a gardening post to share with you this week, so stay tuned.  I've been working away in the yard as much as I can.  We've had some beautiful weather lately and everything is blooming. 

Gosh it felt so good to create some this weekend.  Thanks for letting me share it with you, and I hope you try something new with an old stamp soon!

Til Next Time,