For the love of creating...

How many of us make up our minds before we really try something out?  It's sad.  So often we lose out on great opportunities to stretch ourselves and to find new talents within ourselves.  I fell into stamping purely by accident.  I had no desire to make cards or stamp or do paper-crafting beyond scrapbooking.  That was my mind-set.  I had made up my mind before even giving stamping a chance.

So why did I suddenly embrace stamping and card-making and all sorts of paper-crafting?  It happened at a scrapbooking crop.  It was an all-day crop, beginning at 9 a.m. and ending at midnight.  My daughter and I had a family vacation that was taking forever to scrap and we thought that this might just be the place to finish it.  Well, that didn't happen.  We scrap too painstakingly and take way too many photos to finish anything in one day, even a very, very long day.  But that was the day we both tried our hands at stamping simply because a local craft store was offering make-n-takes at the crop.  To give ourselves a break from what was becoming the everlasting project, we decided to do one of the make-n-takes.  It was a card.  The result was terrific.  It seemed so easy to achieve something very, very nice, indeed.  We were hooked.

One of the things that we learned as we made the card was heat embossing.  It was magical to see that powder become glossy.  So magical and wonderful that we went out and purchased our very own heat guns and Versa Mark pads and embossing powder.  And stamps.  Of course we needed stamps.  The local craft store was suddenly our favourite place to shop.

And then we were invited to a Stampin' Up! workshop.  Oh my, the goodies in those catalogues!  And then came the Open House we attended, put on by the same demonstrator that had the workshop.  That's when we joined a card club.  It was inevitable that one of us would become a demonstrator, right?  Well, I drew the short straw.  And I haven't looked back since.

There is something about stamping and card-making that fulfills a creative need within me.  Each of my cards is a tiny canvas on which I create a little masterpiece using stamps, techniques, embellishments, etc.  I never know where a card is going to lead me or when something I'm doing is going to lead to a card.  I love it!

Sometimes I drift, not quite sure what I want to do but sure that I want to do something.  Those are some of the times I've made the best of my cards.  Sometimes a piece of Designer Paper will lead me.  For example, when I was making a paper rosette and suddenly realized it reminded me of a peacock's tail.  That's what I began with: the rosette.  That grew into such an awesome card.  All the colours were decided by the Designer Paper---it simply grew out of the paper and became the card.  I've had that happen with painting or sketching, but it was a new experience with card-making.

This is the card that grew out of a Designer Paper rosette.

Isn't it wonderful when something is right there, asking to be released into the world, and you are the lucky person to release it?  I loved being part of releasing this card into the world.