CRAFT YOU.

It was supposed to be a piece of glorious-ness.  A thing of beauty.  Or at least, presentable.  But alas, we don’t always get what we want. 

After (finally) reading through several months’ worth of scrapbooking magazines, I decided to tackle something simple–a card made primarily of embossed white-core cardstock.  Add a little sanding, a small stamp, and there you have a very nice greeting, right?  Wrong.  It went terribly wrong.  There were warnings.

First red flag:  I wanted the grid lines to be on the half inch.  They weren’t.  You can’t hide that when you are attempting to create a distinct pattern with score lines. 

Second red flag:  I had to start with a new card.  Although I measured it correctly, I scored it halfway in the wrong place.  (Did I mention that I only had two pieces of cardstock in the color I wanted?)  Again, another tricky mistake to cover.

Since this was my last piece, and I could (and did) potentially re-score it, I pursued, determined to make this work.  There!  The grid pattern came out perfect.  Now, onto sanding.  Wait..wait…not..really….working.  (Trying again.)  But not really getting the effect I wanted.  So far, this white-core cardstock thing doesn’t seem to be a good fit for me.

I moved on to the next step.  I made “pumpkins” out of scallop circle punches.  I then embossed them–swiss polka dot style–and then filed down to get to the white-core.  They turned out better.  I added a ribbon “stem” to each and adhered the pumpkins to the card with dimensionals.  Wow! I can’t believe how badly this is turning out.  However, I felt that I had put too much brain power in it not to see it through.  After all, it may just turn out nice.  (HA!)

I notched a small triangle out of the edges to allow something for my fiber (in this case, embroidery floss) to hang on to.  I inked and punched a small “Happy Halloween”, threaded it with the floss, and tied a knot.  Done.  No good.  Still hated it. 

The point is, not matter how lovely it looks in your head, it may not translate in real life.  And, no matter how many fancy tricks you can demonstrate, your real salt lies in being able to do wonders with just paper and ink. 

Well, at least I tried.