I watched an impossible card being made on Mixed Up Crafts, and wanted to make mine more impossible by also heat embossing on acetate (clear plastic.) I started with an old Inkadinkado stamp #91406 of an old car and stamped it on clean acetate, then put black fine detail embossing powder on it by Ranger and heat set it. The secret to heat setting on acetate, is heating the gun a lot before taking it to the image, then heat, move away. Heat a different area, move away, and do it quickly. To make an impossible card, you’ll need a 5 x 7″ piece of card stock that isn’t heavy weight, so I used 90 lb card stock. On the 5″ length, make a mark at 2 1/2″ across the entire card. On the 7″ length, make a mark at      3 1/2″ to the center line. On the opposite side of the center mark, make a line at 1″ and 6″ to the center. Then cut on the three lines we made to the center, but DON’T cut on the long center line, but score the center line, (even though I haven’t seen anyone else do it.) I liked the look of rounded corners, so rounded all of mine. You’ll want to flip one of your sides over so it makes it look impossible. I layered paper on mine, but if you want to make an example of this card that is super simple, you can make this with one layer and put all of your work into the center piece that is 2 1/2 x 5″. I used Old Paper ink by Distress Ink and used a foam distressing tool on all my edges. I cut the black center piece to be 4 7/8″ wide by 2 3/8″ tall and cut the dictionary piece to layer on it, 4 3/8″ wide by     1 7/8″ tall, and used wet glue to adhere it. I cut out my car and put Glue Dots behind it so it is more dimensional (and you can’t see the Glue Dots.) I cut another piece of black card stock to cover the back of the center piece 4 7/8 by 2 3/8″ and glued it to the back so it looks finished too. Layering paper on the card is a little tricky. I cut a piece 3 1/4″ wide by 4 3/4″ .  To cut out the “leg,” I trimmed it by putting the long length on the ruler of my paper trimmer so the blade cut at 2 1/4″ and cut it upwards to 2 1/2″ and then turned the paper so the short length of card stock faces the ruler on the paper trimmer. Move it so the paper is at 3/4″ (to the left of the trim blade, and the trimming you’ve already done is to the right of the trimmer.)  Pull the blade from the top down to the cut line and it should cut the leg out. Round the corners if you’ve rounded all of your other corners like I did. (To make the second one, you could flip over the one you made, and trace it on another piece of matching cardstock and then cut it out.  An alternate way of doing this, is to lay the dictionary paper cut to 4 1/2″ x 3″ wide on the black card stock that’s already trimmed  and make a mark where you need to cut the leg and where to cut the middle cut. It worked so much easier for me doing it this way and you might want to use this system for the black layer too by laying it on the card and making marks where you need to make the cuts.  If your paper has a direction, make sure it is left to right on the 3″ width. Round your edges.  I cut two 5″ long by 1″ tall pieces of black card stock and rounded the corners. I used Princess Gold embossing powder by Ranger and an old Stampin’ Up stamp for my sentiment. I stamped it with Versamark ink and attached one on the front and one on the back. I used two peg stamps http://www.pegstamps.com, Happy Birthday and Doggy Running Happy stamped with Versafine Onyx Black ink to stamp the envelope.

I seriously hate to whine about my continuous screw-ups, but this one is so irritating.  I put the lock on the front of the album and then never looked at it again, until it was time to work with the letters I’m adding to the front.  That’s when it occurred to me that I might have attached it to the back cover instead of the front….And that’s not all….it’s also upside down..Oh yeah, I wanted to throw the whole thing through a window, but instead, I’m going to let it sit there until I’ve decided what to do next.  CRAP!!!!!!!!

I got great advice from a couple of people about how to fix the brass colored corner covers and how to make them look coppery.  One said to try different embossing powders, which I will, and the other, from Lindsay, was to use copper alcohol ink.  I probably have some and never thought about trying it.  So if one idea doesn’t work, we’ll go to Plan B.  I have a lot of the corners, so can ruin a few until I get this right.  I’m still hoping that this plan will come together and I’ll be proud of my end result, but right now, I’m stuck in the “hot mess” phase, and I’m not really sure if I’ll ever come out of it.   I live in hope.

I was lucky to be asked by the makers of Glue Dots to review a prototype Glue Dot product. When they sent me the prototype, they also sent me a huge box of all types of Glue Dots. I did some research and learned a lot about Glue Dots along the way.
The first thing I learned is that we, as crafters, remove them from their backing incorrectly. It’s no wonder mine are always curled.  To properly remove Glue Dots from their backing, you should take the embellishment to the Glue Dot and adhere it to the Glue Dot, vs trying to remove the Glue Dot from it’s backing and then attaching it to the embellishment. Once I learned how to do this, my Glue Dot application was so much easier.
They also recommend that you don’t touch the Glue Dots, as our body oils will make them less sticky.
You can buy dispensers for Glue Dots that will allow you to refill them and have a permanent way to dispense the size of Glue Dots you use. (I attached two sites to purchase Glue Dots and the dispensers at the bottom of this information)..Of the two dispensers. the blue was empty, and can be filled with any of the varieites that I show in boxes. The second, pink one, came with Mini Glue Dots.

Here are the varieties of Glue Dots available: (There’s a circle on the top right side of Glue Dot boxes that shows the size of the Glue Dots in the box.)

Micro Glue Dots- used intricate, possibly beading on a bag, 325 to a package, 1/8″ across.

Ultra Thin- When you need a flat piece of glue. 300 in a package. 3/8″ wide

Removable Dots- Temporary, made to be removed, 200 in a package, 1/2″ wide

Pop Up Dots- Thick, three dimensional. 75 in a package 1/2″ wide.

All Purpose Dots- Hold up to 8 Lb. Super Strength, all purpose, 3/8″ wide 300 in package

Mini-Dot– bigger than the micro 3/16″ wide 300 in package.

Glue Lines–1″ long, 200 in a package. I think these would be great for homemade envelopes.

X-Large Glue Dots–come in a baggie and are perforated, 60 to a package, and 1″ across.

Glue Dots make runners: There is a wheel on the side of the Glue Dot runners. Roll the wheel so it moves one Glue Dot to the exposed area, then it’s simple to remove only one.

Mini Dots 300 pkg. 3/16″ Kiwi green
Super Strength 3/8″ 200 pkg. red
Ultra-Thin 3/8″ 300 pkg blue
Super Strength Glue Squares 3/16″ 450 pkg. dark blue
Permanent dots 3/8″ 200 pkg. (these Glue Dots are blue) clear blue container
Removable–temporary 3/8″ 450 pkg. green packaging
Removable Squares-temporary darker green packaging

Refillable Glue Dot Runners
Super Strength (Blue) 3/8″ by 72 feet long strips that are perforated.
Temporary (Green) 1/3″ by 52 ft. easy removable, perfect for projects that need to be held down temporarily.

Here’s a link to purchase Glue Dots—

Amazon:  http://tinyurl.com/y8j2lfcm

Today was the local library’s book sale, and Rich took me so we could stock up.  There weren’t a lot of people when we got there, so we were able to read back covers and hopefully, find new authors we might like.  Since we already have a lot of books we haven’t read, there’s a good chance that we have most of our favorite authors’ books, so buying them only leads to duplicates.  We’ve found this out the hard way.

Rich came home and opened one he really thought he would like, only to find instead of a suspense/mystery, it appears to be a romance novel.  Let’s just say he was under impressed, (but I thought it was really funny.)  If I had to bet, I’d say it’s going in the donate pile.

I spent most of the afternoon and evening working on the album I’m making.  I’ve had so many things go wrong with this project…From gluing pages together, to gluing the cover together before I put two brads through it, and so on.  I’m pretty sure I’ll be adding a pocket, or some kind of embellishments to the inside cover to ensure that I cover the backs of the brads, but before I do that, I need to finish the front cover so I don’t have the same problem with another embellishment I choose for the front.  I showed the lock and key I’m using for the front cover.  Tim Holtz has one in his lock embellishments that’s coppery colored.  It was perfect for my cover.  And because there was only one coppery colored one, they only provided two coppery colored brads to attach it.  I knew they were small, but the minute I tried to insert one, it disappeared.  I search myself for over an hour, before enlisting Rich’s help.  Luckily he found it, but it did take him quite a while.  He wondered if they could maybe make them smaller, so they would be completely invisible.  (Let’s just say he wasn’t excited to be crawling around looking for the smallest brad known to man.)  I ended by attaching the second brad and throwing in the towel for the day.   I do need help with something.  I have corner covers that are metal(ish).  I don’t know what they are made out of, but a magnet won’t pick them up.  The ones I’ve bought look like brass.  Do any of you know how I could make them look coppery?  I thought about spray painting them, but they look antiqued now, and I don’t know of any spray paint that would allow them to look antiqued once spray painted.  I’d appreciate any help I can get to make these look like they belong on the album.

I decided I have stalled long enough on the album for our friends, and today, I started working on it.  I wanted to make a video detailing how I made it, but I didn’t think anyone would care if I did all of the measuring, cutting, tear taping and punching, that needed done.  I was surprised by the time it took to do those things for an album that is maybe nine pages in length.  I guess we’ll see how long it takes to make the video tomorrow.  I think I’ll glue most of the pages together so you won’t have to watch that either.  It’s hard to know what people would like to see and what they would prefer to have me skip, so I’ll show a little bit of everything, but not all of anything.  Wow, that could be the mission of my channel….haha.

Rich worked on editing the Glue Dot video and I’m hoping that it will go live tomorrow.  There’s a book sale at our local library in the morning, and after that we’re both going to get serious about our YouTube responsibilities.  I guess it’s more like a privilege than a responsibility.  OK, for me, it’s more like fun.  There’s always time for that.

I had a lot of ambition today, but as the day progressed, lost the will to do much.  I really need to get started on the album for our friends’ new house, but I’m not completely sure of the type of album I want to create, so keep stalling.

I watched a video of a woman using scraps to make a card and think I’ll make one of those, but the video was made by a Stampin’ Up rep, and she talked non-stop about how great she treats her customers, and even went into detail about their rewards program and incentives, and that’s when she lost me.  I really like watching videos for the sake of the video, and if you discuss a product that you sell, that’s great…..just don’t tell me about  how good you are to your customer and the things you’ll do to give back your incentives.  Am I whining too much?   I do realize that they use YouTube to supplement their income and to encourage their customers to buy more product from them, but I just can’t handle the extra sales pitch.  It’s similar to watching a YouTube video where there is advertising placed every five minutes in the video.  I don’t think anyone wants to have a video interrupted for the exact same advertisement in five minute intervals.  Maybe I’m just out of touch, but isn’t one advertisement at the beginning of a video sufficient?  Just my two cents on things.  I need to take a break from watching videos, as it’s making me cranky.

I had so much crafty fun today.  I finally made the Glue Dot video showing all of the different types, sizes, and uses for them.  It was so much fun, and those types of videos are my absolute favorites to make.  Then I went on to make an impossible card.  They are all the rage on YouTube right now, and I thought I would make an impossible card even more impossible, by stamping and embossing on acetate…..(Clear plastic for those of us who prefer everyday terms instead of “big girl words.”)  It’s not extremely difficult to stamp on acetate, but you may get an imperfect image (I found), because the plastic will not show all of the detail the stamp has.  It didn’t matter to me, because I was just stamping an antique car with black ink and covering it with black embossing powder.  Of course the black embossing powder hides all of the imperfections of the stamping below, and it’s the reason I used it.  I’m not a fan of black embossing powder, as it’s very difficult to remove all of the small specks that are left behind.  I spent a little extra time wiping and blowing on it to get rid of the excess, and then started heat setting.  I knew it would be easy to melt, and did melt my first attempt…..I made sure to show the melted image, so you know it’s OK to melt yours (as long as you have spare plastic).  I used plastic from stamp sets I’d purchased and encourage others to do the same.  You can buy heat resistant acetate, but why bother, when the free plastic works just as well.  We’ll assume I know and have used the plastic you can purchase, which I haven’t.

Second attempt worked perfectly, no melting or warping.  I really liked the end result of the more impossible, impossible card, and hope all of you will too.  Rich has a couple videos he needs to upload first, then you’ll see how fun and easy the impossible card really is.  In case you’ve never seen a video of one, it’s one piece of card stock that looks like several.  Whoever came up with the idea were really creative, and my hat goes off to them.  It’s not a hard card to make if you don’t layer papers on it, but if you do, it’s not quite as easy.  I recommend that your first attempt should be with some patterned paper that is heavy enough to hold up to all of the different folds this card requires.  After that, the center focal image is where you can spend your time.  It shouldn’t be hard to do and has a big impact.  This is one of those cards that will make the recipient ask, “How did you do that?”   I love it when people ask…

 

I thought before I’d discuss my plans for today that I’d give you my review of the movie “Chappaquiddick.”  I liked it.  It was sad, and it seemed that she didn’t drown, but ran out of air as he just left her there.  He did bring others back to try to get her out, but by then it was too late.  The local funeral director noted that when they pressed on her lungs, water didn’t come out, and he said he’d seen a lot of drownings and that it looked like instead, she’d suffocated from lack of oxygen in the car.  Of course no autopsy was done, and they did everything possible to protect the senator.  I was ten when it happened, and didn’t realize that a man walked on the moon the same weekend, so they used the momentum from the space walk to distract Americans from the story.  Obviously, it’s a movie, so we’ll never really know the true story, but it was sad for her and her family.

Back to plans for the day.  Since Rich is now caught up with me, darn it, I have some cards to make.  I am going to try stamping and coloring on acetate, and making a manly card for a friend’s birthday.  I’m going to work on the box I decorated with Shelli and Linda, as some of the video files were corrupted from that day, so I’m going to need to add more footage, so the video makes sense and helps others if they want to try to redecorate something.  I have a few more video ideas, but if I finish my plans for today, I think I’ll be doing good.

On a crappy note, it’s snowing and I can’t see the grass again.  April 17th, not sure it’s ever going to turn to spring.  We still don’t have any buds on our trees.  I hate it when we have a very short spring, as it seems like it’s a blink of the eye and winter again.  Sorry for the whine….

I’ve been wanting to make a card with envelopes as well as large business envelopes, so this is my first attempt.  All of the info to make this project is below:
I started with 9 1/4″ tall by 8″ wide scored on the 8″ side at 4″  white Recollections heavyweight card stock  (from Michaels) to make the card 9 1/4″ tall by 4″ wide to fit in our business envelope.
I had gotten decorated envelopes from my friend Rhonda and thought I could use them on my card, but they were just too big. Bummer!
I made envelopes that were 2 3/4″ wide by 2″ tall. To make them, cut a piece of card stock (scrap) to 2 5/8″ by 1 7/8″ tall for the piece that you will be using in your envelope and then discarding.  If you measure the card on the diagonal, you should have the measurement be 3 1/2″ (roughly), then add 1 inch to that to make your total 4 1/2″…You’ll cut paper square to 4 1/2″  by 4 1/2″.  I used a paper pad from Hobby Lobby that I don’t think is still available, but any lightweight paper will work for this. Put the scrap that you cut to 2 5/8″ by 1 7/8″ tall, into the center of the square of paper you cut to 4 1/2″ on the diagonal like a baseball field. Center the scrap, and wrap your paper on the sides and fold them in, then fold the bottom up and the top down and press for clean folds. Take the scrap out and trim out the little corners that you’ll have where your folded paper overlapped itself. I like to trim the corners so they look better, with whatever corner rounder you like. I have a Kadomaru Pro that I got from Amazon, and here’s the link. http://tinyurl.com/yd9nffm2    The reason I like it so much is that there are three sizes of corners you can round, small, medium, and large, so it works no matter how big or small your paper is.  Plus I can easily press the lever.
After rounding the corners of each envelope, glue it so the sides and bottom are glued down….don’t glue the top down. I took twine that matched and wrapped it (about 18″) around the envelope after putting the “open” on the twine about halfway down the length of twine.  I used MayMay’s set called “Action” for stamping “open” on small price tags that I punched with a Fiskars punch and used Gina K’s ink called Blue Denim for my stamping.  I punched a hole in it with a hole punch by putting a small mark where I wanted the hole, then putting the hole punch upside down so I could see the mark, then punching the hole. The hole punch I used came from Hobby Lobby as well, but couldn’t find it on their website, so maybe they don’t sell it any more, but any hole punch should work.

For the words I wanted to put inside my envelopes, I printed them from my computer using, “So sorry we missed your birthday.”  I typed two words on a line using a larger font that looked size appropriate for the envelope..  I rounded the corners of the scraps I had left over from my envelopes and cut them to  2 1/2″ by 1 3/4″ tall and glued the words to the papers then put them inside my envelopes.  After I placed the sentiments in each of my three envelopes, I wrapped the twine with the “open” sentiment on them around the envelopes, then hot glued them to my card.  Be careful to make sure you put the words in the right envelopes so they make sense when removed.

I used peg stamps from “the Sweet Songs of Spring” stamp set from https://pegstamps.com/newest-stamps/sweet-song-of-spring.html and Perfect Layering Circles https://pegstamps.com/newest-stamps/perfect-layering-circles.html for making swatches on my ink pads.

I used Gina K’s BubbleGum Pink ink for stamping along with her Blue Denim Ink and used a small flower and a sprig to stamp along the sides of the envelopes and inside the card where I stamped my sentiment from an old Stampin’ Up set of stamps that had a nice birthday sentiment.   I also stamped them on the business envelope I used for mailing my card.
I added my made by Sandy Parker stamp on the back. I often get asked where I got it and here’s how you can get one too. I looked online for coupons for Stampanda, and Groupon had a great discount. They currently don’t offer one, but Stampanda shows a 40% discount code when you go to their website (Hello2017 is the code) and in square stamps found the “Molly” with the swirl and changed it to say what I wanted it to say. Here’s the link to the one I bought. http://stampanda.com/product/molly/?attribute_pa_ink-color=licorice-black. I typed in on one line “Made for you by” and on the next line “Sandy Parker.” I saved a lot of money by going through Groupon, otherwise this stamp is around $45. Hopefully the code will give you a 40% discount so it will end up being around $27. I wish it wasn’t so complicated for you, but I tried to make it as simple as possible.

I’m a little worried about the videos we shot yesterday, as some are coming up as faulty, so will probably not play.  I’m not going to look at them until later, as I don’t want to ruin my day…Instead, I’m taking one of my closest friends out for lunch for her birthday, and then Rich and I are meeting college friends to go to a movie.  Rich and his male friend are going to see “Rampage,” not my kind of movie…Gorilla’s get huge and there’s a huge flying alligator, so I’ll pass.  The wife of our friend and I will be going to see Chappaquiddick.  I was really young when that event happened, so I’ll be interested to hear how they depict the events of that evening so many years ago.  I’ll be sure to let you know what I think of it.  The four of us went to see a “Quiet Place” last week and we really liked it.  They had so many innovative ideas about how to handle aliens that can’t see, but can hear everything, and that was so much fun to watch.  Especially as she was pregnant and had a baby…you keep thinking, how will they handle keeping the baby quiet, and of course, there’s a great plan that you never really figure out until they show you.  I’ll say this, the movie wasn’t the only “Quiet Place,” as the theater was completely silent for the entire movie, like every person there was holding their collective breaths, and I think they probably were.  Emily Blunt was amazing, and so was her husband, who also directed it.  You could see every expression play out on their faces, as the number of spoken words in the movie were less than fifty.  An amazing accomplishment, and so scary….you definitely should go see it in a theater if you can, because it’s so funny how the crowd buys into the complete and total quiet.