News on the OLW...and a Mess of My Own Making

First the news. Sadly, Jennifer Styles has to step down as a host of the OLW challenges. I am going to miss her enormously as her support and encouragement kept the OLW going when I was ready to give up on it. But she has a job that is taking her time away from stamping, and so I will post her last challenge here on Simplicity tomorrow (Thursday).

Second, I made a mess in my stamp area. Perhaps you can relate.

We'll be dealing with the rather appalling collage card in the center of the picture tomorrow, when I make it over into something that looks like I actually made it. (You can see even in this picture how crooked the vellum piece is on the card. Egads.)

But first of all notice the stained washcloth in the front center of the photo. That's freshly laundered and waiting to be put in a drawer where I keep my stamp-cleaning cloths.

I clean my inky stamps (as I work) with a dampened washcloth kept in a travel case for baby wipes (on the right of the photo). Behind that is my official Stamp Cleaning pad that I spritz with Ultra Clean (or whatever the stamp cleaner that PTI sells is called). That doesn't get used often because mostly the cheapo Target washcloths and water do a fine job.

Just don't close the travel case completely when a wet washcloth is in it. The sour smell makes me sick. If the case is left as it is in photo (the washcloth holds the lid up ever so slightly), the cloth will just slowly dry out over a couple of days with no unpleasant smell.

Before I embarked on the ill-fated collage card, I pulled out a gorgeous piece of printed vellum that I have owned--and I'm not kidding--for ten years. It's my last piece of this particular paper. How SAD! Every now and then, I pull it out just to look at it and decide it's too pretty to cut. Last year, I actually punched some butterflies out of it, and it hurt me to do so.

On this occasion, I decided I was being perfectly silly and resolved to use the pretty thing. So I made these, which you can see shoved to the left side in the picture of the mess.

I love the luminous quality of the yellowish, antiqued vellum on crisp white. Buried in the detritus of the picture are two L-shaped pieces of card stock that I used to find attractive sections of the vellum. Put the Ls at opposite corners to form a rectangle, and slide them around until you get something that looks interesting. It's a trick I picked up cropping photos back in my scrapping days.

Once the Ls were positioned, I used my quilting ruler to measure and then cut a slightly larger piece of the vellum so I could tape the extra to the underside of the window.

I cut the windows using my quilting ruler (in the forward left section of the photo) and a craft knife.

The paper is so appealing and contains words so that any stamping on the frames would just distract. I've now used up almost all the vellum and feel VERY happy that it's been put to good use.

What can you find in your stash that you've been unhealthily hoarding? Pull it out and use it!!!!!

It feels good!