I had a plan.  I thought it was a good one.  I was going to make brownies and a card for my 80 year old 5th grade teacher who still plays basketball with Rich.  Funny how plans can go awry.

It started with the brownies, or maybe it ended there.  I put them in the oven and they came out beautifully….For those of you who don’t know this, I don’t have the world’s best nose.  Rich came upstairs, smelled the brownies and said “they smell funny.”  He tasted them and said they tasted like the box.  Apparently when I bought them, I didn’t look at the date, and they were old…..really old…..So into the garbage they went.

Onto the card.  I thought I’d make a simple card using a dotted stencil and layered dies of the number 80 and the word “happy” die cut.  I layered them together, everything went fine, and then I decided to heat emboss them.  The embossing powder wouldn’t stick to the edges, wouldn’t do anything I wanted, and I ended up with so many layers on the word happy, that it cracked in half when I tried to glue it to the card…and that’s not even the bad part.  The number 80 dies were balloon shaped, so I’d need to attach a string to them.  First I tried a different embossing powder, same crappy results….and now time is of the essence..I’m running late.  Rich needs to leave for basketball.  So I flick another color embossing powder onto the numbers, heat set them, and decide “good enough.”  And then things went from bad to worse.  I was using a new twine I’d bought at a Hallmark store that’s really great quality…..until you cut it.  And then it starts to unravel…forget gluing the ends and trying to “re-twine” it, as nothing would keep it together.  So round two…this time I got the 8 on, but the 0 was not playing with me.  I had glue all over, and strands of twine glued to my hands, and fibers on the paper.  It looked so terrible…..and at that point I just thought, “Screw it, take the card.”  Until I opened it….when my hands touched the inside of the card, all the ink and glue that was on my hand was now inside the card.  I seriously wanted to cry.  Instead I took it to the kitchen, showed it to Rich and said, “It’s only paper,” and chucked it into the trash.  So if you’re thinking you might at some point see a video of this debacle, think again…I’m not sure when I’ll have the guts to get back in the craft room, or make brownies again…it’s all up for discussion….One things for sure, I’ll be checking expiration dates before I buy brownie mix again…..And that twine, it might wrap presents, but it definitely didn’t work on a card.  Crap!

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