D@mn Ugly Card

Ack! I didn't mean to go an entire week without posting to the blog. I made this card on Monday for the Splitcoaststampers weekly Technique Lover's Challenge. This was TLC #151--make a heart pocket card. (BTW, I always think of the Technique Lover's Challenge as the TNT challenge because it says Try a New Technique on the front page. Doesn't TNT sound more exciting than TLC? I'd much rather play with dynamite than give tender loving care. Okay, I've never played with dynamite, but it still sounds better.) So, about the card . . . it is quite possibly the ugliest card that I have ever made. I debated for four days whether or not I was going to post it, but I finally decided to share it as an example of what NOT to do with our stamps! I think that there are certain elements of the card that are good in theory: the eyelet border, the cute button brads on the heart, the Valentine-y colored Beatrice. However, they just don't work together . . . or separately for that matter.
In other news, we received our wood blocks for our next round of stamps. Yes, we're going to sell mounted stamps, but don't worry, we'll still sell unmounted stamps as well. (Phew, that was a run-on sentence if there ever was one.) We're very committed to selling both kinds of stamps because there are "extremists" in each camp who won't buy a stamp because it is unmounted or mounted, even if they really like it, and we need our customer base to be as broad as possible. Anyway, we received the blocks. They came packaged in two boxes--one weighing 50 pounds and the other weighing 20 pounds. Carol and I both had to carry the 50 pound box and we almost slipped on the ice on my street and then I almost dropped the box on Carol while we were going down the steps to the basement. Of course the block sizes are all mixed up and we need to sort them out. I'm thinking that will be a job that I'll give to Oblivianna (my oldest daughter, and no that really isn't her name . . . we just call her that sometimes because she is a little spacey at times). I'm sure that it will be fun for her for the first ten minutes and then she'll want to quit. Then I'll have to use it as punishment for when she misbehaves. That's good, I guess. We're running low on fresh and effective punishments.
That's all the news in the Eccentric Imaginatrix for right now. Maybe I can make some more ugly cards to share this week! I'll leave the making of the pretty cards to AJ.