Step outside that comfort zone....

I am a creature of habit.

I tend to use, wear, eat, listen and buy the same kind of things and where longevity is concerned it gets harder to step outside of that box.

I have been paper crafting for what feels like forever and you absolutely can fall into that routine of choosing the same colours, styles and products....1000% guilty as charged.

But what happens when you step outside that box?

Good things can happen.

Case in point, this lemon and lime beauty.

Is it pink?  No.
Is it purple?  No. 
Have a splash of teal?  No.
Is it glittery?  No.

Well there you go, something outside of the norm but it works, and it works really well.

That Damask Love pattern paper is glorious!  Bonus point for being able to use my most favourite cupcake stamp set from Papermania.....many years old and still going strong.

I am really trying to push myself to create more, to use up product that I already own and to show some love to my tools and supplies that have not been used in a long time.  I am a big fan of combining the old and the new in my creations and I feel that this is a great example of how you can take something new and exciting (that damask love paper) and make it shine even brighter with things you already own.  Pretty much everything else on this card is years and years old and who would know, they compliment each other perfectly.

So advise for the day,  step outside that box and try something different, you never know, you might just like it.

Cards and more cards

So I have a small confession to make.....


I used to really struggle with making cards, i sometimes still do.

For many years I was a traditional scrabooker and paper crafted using a 12x12 square base and when I tried to make a card I was stumped by the sheer lack of space that I had to work with.

These days however I have been embracing card making and tags, it has taken a bit of practice, trial and error but I finally got to a happy creative place with that small space.

One of the things that I love about the smaller scale of cards is that they are less overwhelming to try new techniques with, generally are less time consuming than a scrapbook page as alas I am a slow scrapbooker and exceptionally time poor these days and they are a great way to use up small amounts of left over products. 
If you know me at all in person I LOVE to be able to use as much of a product up as I can, I love frugal DIY's and I am a huge advocate of using all the old product and cards are perfect for this.

This was a fun experiment with gelatos, stencils and modelling paste, I also got to use my favourite cupcake stamp from docrafts. 

These tags are an example of a great way to use up older products in your stash.  These tags came from a craft kit and had sweater type prints on the bottom of them that I would never use. I managed to salvage them by covering up most of the pattern with washi tape.

How I love this card.  This was a lengthy make as I just could not get this card "looking" right.
I think it looks perfectly adorable now though.

Sometimes ideas don't pan out the way that you envision them in your head and sometimes you just need to play around with different ideas.  This is another card that has a few DIY and saved items on it.  The glitter hearts are from a homemade glitter paste, The card base is years and years old from when I worked in a wedding and invitation store and the gorgeous vintage girl image was cut from a pocket page card that I would never use for it's intended use as a pocket page card but I just loved her so much that I needed to find a way to incorporate her into my crafting somehow.