Red Velvet Love

In grad school, a male professor who loved discussing sex in literature assigned a poem for us to explicate. The short poem described a young man on a lunch break in a warehouse looking at a picture in a naughty magazine. I remember nothing else about the poem except there were red velvet curtains in the magazine picture.

How cliche.

This professor was not my favorite. Not because I'm a prude, mind you (pears!), but because he was rigid in his thinking. There was only one way to explicate that poem: his way. He wanted all our papers to regurgitate his ideas. 

While intellectual rigor is necessary and good, rigid thinking hampers any intellectual activity. Literary critics, if they are good, play with ideas and interpretations, test them, see if they hold up, look at literary works in fresh and different ways, seek meaning and acknowledge ambiguity, engage in constructive debate and read other scholars' interpretations with open minds and curiosity. It really is quite a lot of fun, if done properly.

We stampers should not be rigid in our thinking, either. We benefit from experiment, play, mistakes, curiosity, stretching our skills and supplies, interacting with other stampers and debating the merits of, say, pigment inks and dye inks, or visual triangles. 

Red velvet ribbon, for instance, is a delight to play with, especially on a card for Valentine's Day. Even poets and naughty magazines know that nothing says true love like red velvet. 

The ribbon is attached with Scor-Tape and trimmed flush with the edges of the card. The architectural letters were punched out and attached over the very thick ribbon with dimensionals placed top and bottom (the ribbon runs through the gap between the dimensionals). While I loved the contrast of the soft velvet and the crisp letters, the design still looked a little blah, so of course I added bling. It's a shiny, velvety card that might appeal to a man...not too romantic or girly.

Please share something that you have played or experimented with lately. I'd love to get some fresh ideas!

Mercy, grace, peace, and love,

Susan

Supplies

stamps: Hampton Arts (really old!)

paper: Papertrey white

ink: Archival red geranium

accessories: red velvet ribbon, dimensionals, rhinestones