A Peek at Process and Why Waxed Paper Is Your Friend

Eeeep! I'm loving being back in the classroom. It's so challenging and fun and engaging! But I miss stamping in all the busyness, and it felt good to get some stamping time in on Saturday.

Here's some of what kept me away from stamping and blogging about it this week.

College drop off for Mr. Scruffy Face
(I love his scruff!)

Sweet 16 for the Boy in Blue

Mr. Naughty acting out at all the changes.
"Who? Me?" He ate part of remote and peed in the house,
among other assorted badness.

And the teaching. Y'all, it's like coming home again after a VERY long vacation. The teaching part is like riding a bicycle...it all comes back quickly. But integrating computers into the teaching is a challenge. One of the adjunct coordinators is meeting with me tomorrow to help me learn the nuances of the system, and her offer to do that is just one example of how nice and thoughtful and kind the people at  Sinclair have been toward me.

Like I said. Feels like coming home. Yippeeeeeee!

And now, down to business.

Today's card is another Christmas card. If you've been reading Simplicity for a while, you know mass producing cards isn't for me. I get bored too quickly, and the process ceases to delight. So it's important for me to make a lot of one-off Christmas cards, which takes much longer than making 50 or 100 of the same design.

To aid me in the process of making so many individual, unique cards, I pull out my holiday stamps, embellishments, and more so they are out on my desk and easy to reach. Here are a few of the bins I've stocked for this season of Christmas-in-blazing-hot-and-humid-Ohio-summer.

The dies, embellishments, and multitude of stamps all pulled together is pretty festive! Having everything out on my workspace not only inspires me but makes creating lots of diverse cards so much easier. I can supplement this stash with other stamps or supplies in my craft room (background stamps, star stamps, glitter paper, etc.) as the whim strikes.

If you're like me and make a lot of different Christmas cards, what suggestions do YOU have to make the process easier? Inquiring minds, and all that. Please comment below so others may benefit from your genius!

For today's card, I used a small Hero Arts set (Stamp and Cut Holiday Ornaments) with coordinating dies.

While this is a fairly ordinary card (despite the non-traditional color scheme), tying the cord was tricky, and I'd like to share a tip with you.

First, I attached the ornament to the card with dimensionals and glued the end of a straight piece of silver cord directly on the hanging loop of the die cut. I then placed a piece of waxed paper over the card and put a clear acrylic block on top to hold the cord in place until it dried completely. This creates a very tight hold for the cord.

Then, I tied the bow and trimmed it. After adding a generous dot of glue where the cord ended, I placed the bow on the glue, covered the whole thing with waxed paper again, and added weight to hold it in place.

Using waxed  paper is essential here. If you don't, whatever weight you put on the cord will stick to the glue and create a mess. But glue doesn't stick to the waxed paper. So yay! Everything sticks down extremely well and looks amazing!

Now, generally speaking, most of my holiday cards are fairly traditional colors of red and green, gold and silver, or blue. But every year, I experiment with other colors...teal here, purple occasionally, some pink and green there. Because getting in a rut would be boring, don't you think?

And now I'm off to bed, because 5:15 comes early in the morning and my body's still not adjusted to working. Thanks to you all for your patience and support through this season of my life. Stampers really are the best!

Hugs, mercy, grace, peace, and love to you,
Susan

Supplies
stamps: Hero Arts Holiday Ornaments, Papertrey Side-by-Side Sentiments
ink: can't remember the teal (maybe Archival paradise teal), Archival aquamarine (on envelope), Hero Arts soft granite
paper: Papertrey white
accessories: silver cord, liquid glue, waxed paper, dimensionals, craft foam, coordinating die