Find Beauty in Life - TCPTUES281

I was really excited that my Christmas purchase from The Cat's Pajamas arrived yesterday. I was the very fortunate winner of the Winter Blog Hop giveaway, and it didn't take me long to spend my gift certificate and then some. At some point yesterday, when I got up to let the dogs out, checked the front door and yay! There was a pizza delivery! I love that my goodies came in a pizza box!!! The mail person sandwiched it between the two doors. I somehow managed to safely wield a knife and slice into my box (haha pun intended). I quickly glimpsed at the goodies then crawled back into bed. You see, I was still letting the morphine wear off from my late Friday night visit to the hospital emergency room. I was the lucky recipient of a 4 mm kidney stone. Which is really not very big in the grand scheme of things. Don't make me get my collection out... I will take pictures and inflict them on you! I've had kidney stones for about 21 years now. It's pretty run of the mill for me, and in fact this is the first one in 18 months. So yeah, lots of grogginess over the past few days. At last check (CT scan Saturday morning) the stone was kicking around in my bladder. It should pass without too much trouble now. Knock on wood. I was in a fair amount of pain at the time though (before it migrated to my bladder) and was pretty loaded up on morphine. A whole 20 mg before I even got to the hospital, and it wasn't even making a dent in the pain so that's when I need it by IV. Anyhow, I'm sure you're not here to read about kidney stones or pain medication.

So I finally woke up after two and a half days of sleeping off and on, and decided to play with my goodies last night. Of course the first thing I wanted to do was to make a card for TCP Tuesday. This week is an inspiration challenge:

I thought it fortuitous that one of the sets I purchased and that just arrived was Simple Blooms. I knew right away when I saw the challenge posted last week that I wanted to use that set. I had somewhat of an imagine in my mind of what I wanted... the obvious flowers, blue sky, clouds... This is what I ended up with:

Where are the clouds you say? They didn't make it. In fact, this wasn't quite what I was going for, and I was going to start over (don't I say that every time?) Then I chose the sentiment "Find Beauty in Life" also from the Simple Blooms set. I chose to see a message therein to myself. Find the beauty, and don't be so hard on yourself. I've always been a perfectionist. If it's not perfect right out of the gate, then it's not good enough. And I usually quit. That's why I don't play sports. ;) I've tried a few things in my life, and I have a hard time sticking with them when I don't do so great. I tried pottery a few years ago. I loved the organic feel of playing with the clay. But I really sucked at the actual pottery part. No really. I wouldn't even let my mom keep that thing as an ashtray, even if she'd paid me a million dollars. Well maybe for a million...

So there you have it. I used Tumbled Glass distress ink for the sky, Evergreen Boughs distress ink for the grass. I inked up the flower stamp with Versafine Smokey Gray and stamped it on scratch paper, then 'shadow' stamped it on the cardstock. Then, I inked up the blooms in Worn Lipstick distress ink, and the stems/leaves in Evergreen Bough. And whammy. It was supposed to be closer to the shadow, but hey whatever. I'm practicing not being so hard on myself. I stamped the sentiment in Versafine Smokey Gray as well, and heat embossed with Judikins clear detail embossing powder.

And there you have it. Quick and simple. Easy peasy. Lemon squeazy. Yup.

Supplies used:
(All these links are from Amazon, except the stamp set is directly on The Cat's Pajamas website. I got all my supplies from TCP though, and I highly recommend that you purchase from there. Because I like Alma, the owner and designer, and I don't like Amazon near as much!)