First crafty attempt in the redesigned craft room - Mojo Mondays and Cure For The Monday Blues challenges

It was all going quite well until I tried to fix a minor annoyance... I bet you've never had that happen to you, right? I'm seriously debating redoing this card, but first I need to buy more adhesive *sigh*. I had some more, but in my clean up I seem to have misplaced it. I did say organized chaos, didn't I? I haven't stocked up too much because I'm still trying to figure out what I like. I've been using Elmer's permanent tape runner. It's okay, nothing to write home about. In fact, my first roll got 'gunked' up because I was using it on paper that had Perfect Pearls on it, which is what made me think I should probably try something else before settling on the end all and be all. Adhesive runners seem to be awfully expensive here in Canada. I wanted to try the Tombow MONO Permanent Adhesive, but do you know how much it costs at Michaels? A pack of one applicator and two refills is $16.99. Ahh! Of course I could use this week's 50% off coupon, but I try to save those to buy Copics! Yes I know I can use a coupon a day... but that's a coupon a day I could be using on Copics. ;)

So anyhow, back to my card. The Seasons Givings Blog Hop just happened last week, and it included over 100 bloggers. Wow, this was so neat to discover so many new blogs, and a whole shwack of new-to-me challenges. I bookmarked a bunch of them, and decided to give some of them a try this week.

I was combining two challenges, Verve Stamps' Mojo Mondays and Taheerah Atchia's Cure For The Monday Blues:


I really liked the sketch that Julee Tilman put together for Mojo Mondays, and I wanted to make a very literal card out of it. As for Taheerah's inspiration, I loved the pink cupcakes and sprinkles. I thought the two would come together quite nicely. I like to use pre-folded cards for practicality's sake, but I didn't have one big enough for what I wanted to do. I thought this should be bigger than than a 4-bar, so I grabbed a sheet of Strathmore Bristol 300 series smooth and cut it down to... uh, I don't remember, lol. Okay, I just went and measured, and it was 5"x 8". I know, that's a weird size. Me and numbers don't go so well together. You can also tell why I prefer to use pre-cut/pre-folded cards. :)

I started rummaging though my small supply of paper, and pulled out a new 6"x 6" pad of Graphic 45 Time to Flourish paper that I bought during Boxing Week. I loved the pinks in it, and thought that would be perfect to represent the soft pink fluffy cupcakes from Taheerah's challenge. I eyeballed square and rectangle sizes to represent the Mojo Monday sketch. I used a coral pink ribbon from my stash, and instead of a bow, I decided to use some balloon embellishments. I thought that would give it a celebration feel, which is what cupcakes and sprinkles remind me of.

I used a stamp set by Inkadinkado. I picked one of the cupcakes and the word 'Celebrate'. I stamped in Versamark ink, and pounced it with a raspberry-colored mica pigment (my own secret no-name supply, lol).

I then got out some pearl and rhinestone embellishments which I semi-randomly placed on the card. I have a whole bunch of little vials of nail embellishments from when my sister was studying to be a nail technician. I thought she was pretty good at it, but she decided to go back to office work and gave me all her embellishments. I found some teeny tiny hearts which I placed to the lower left of the cupcake. I had these pretty pink shell-type fragments that I wanted to sprinkle in the lower right. I was struggling with that a bit, and then next thing I knew, I had smudged the pigment in the cupcake and the sentiment. So I got some pigment powder out again and tried pouncing a little bit. I figured if that didn't help, I would use my Versamarker and touch it up before adding more pigment powder. Well, next thing I knew, there was pigment powder everywhere. It got down in the shell fragments, which I tried to dust with a brush and just ended up spreading it everywhere. I smudged some of the white background cardstock, and it just all went downhill! I added a little string of pink pearls to the corner where the shells and pigment were making a mess to try to distract from said mess. Then I tried 'erasing' the pigment from the cardstock, and that made it worse. So guess what? We're now smudging pigment all over the white cardstock! It was looking a bit too glaringly white anyhow. ;)

I truly debated cutting around the Graphic 45 paper and regluing to a new piece of cardstock. Alas, that's when I ran out of adhesive, and couldn't find my spare. Yup, a real fiasco. I was going to wait a day or two and start all over again, but who cares?! I'm doing this for me, right? I had fun putting it together (until pigment got everywhere!) and that's all that should matter. I decided to document everything so that I can look back at some point and see how far I've come (hopefully!)

So there you have it. I think it's okay. Could I have done better? Absolutely. Can I give this to my sister for her birthday? Um, I'll think about it! ;)

Feedback is always appreciated, but please be nice. My hubby will be terribly upset if he finds me curled up in the bottom of the closet crying, lol. ;)

Supplies used: