craft room work day – new catalogs are coming…

So have you ever wondered what a Stampin’ Up! Demonstrator does this time of year – besides being WILDLY excited with anticipation for the upcoming new annual catalog release! Well this morning I put in my catalog pre-order (demonstrators are allowed to see the new catalog early and purchase a select number of items so that we can get samples ready for the new catalog’s arrival! Also the retired list is out and available – there are items on sale and going fast and some great deals too! So ever year around this time I go through my collection and make a pile some years the piles are bigger and this is a big year – below is a photo of this year’s pile of all my stamps that are retiring I will get them ready to sell photograph them to put on the retired page of this website! and organize all of my card samples that have retired items featured on the card. They will be pulled and organized to sell or give away as prizes and gifts! the second picture is the first stack of cards with retiring product on them!

While trying to organize I also get to try and that is an operative word – try to clean up my desk!! As a self proclaimed paper hoarder – I find it extremely difficult to throw paper away – so I often collect bits and pieces of paper and ribbon from unfinished cards or leftovers from cards made. SOOOO… every once in a while I have a paper crafting clean up day and try to make as many cards out of the scraps on my desk as I can – it is a great creative exercise and stretches your right brain quite a bit! Here are some of the cards I created today … remember the scrapbooking page from Wednesday’s blog post well here are the inside “scraps” from the flowers I used to make the card from that post – I just couldn’t throw it away (see I’m very bad!!) but the card turned out really cute – don’t you think!?

The card below used the last inside flower pieces and some other scraps from the desktop!

The base of this card was an experiment from making my own shimmer cardstock I ended up using another piece of cardstock other than this Misty Moonlight base but kept it to use later (see that is why my desk is always in disarray!) I also had a bunch of 1/2 inch strips of Balmy Blue cardstock from cutting down that color cardstock for a prior class… ever wonder what to do with those colored cardstock strips? The next two cards are great examples of fun ways to use these types of strip scraps! I used shapes in coordinating colors as the sentiment focal point and created a striped background over the shimmer cardstock base.

This second card I striped a Gorgeous grape cardstock base diagonally with the Balmy Blue strips and made an alternating directional pattern. I stamped and colored with Stampin’ Blends the smaller flower from Good Morning Magnolia (#149298) and the Magnolia Memory Dies (#1149578) – which is on the retiring list – this is a beautiful set/die combo – I will be sad to see this one go!

The next four images are from the Fine Art Floral Suite I used one 4″x 5 1/4″ piece of the 12 x 12″ DSP with matching acetate for a card a while back so I cut the rest of it up and made three cards and a beautiful and easy Scrapbooking page.

I continued with the Art gallery Stamp set since it was out on my desk and grabbed some Calypso Coral ink and some plain white butterfly dies from the Butterfly Wings die set and stamped the flowers on the butterflies to give them interest and texture. I had some left over Pearlescent Specialty Paper and ran that through the Dainty Diamonds Embossing Folder and mounted them on the card front!

This next card started with a discarded card front with two “block” stamped images in Magenta madness. I stamped the flower image from Art Gallery and added the words thank you multiple times in a background pattern! I really like the way this one turned out! The In Color ribbons are retiring – so if you want any of these ribbons I would suggest ordering them sooner than later. The current Hostess code is R37A4MHH.

I had some left over pieces from some cards I did about a month ago from the Friends Are Like Seashells Suite. The next two cards are made with those scrap pieces.

The last five cards used the majority of the last scraps on my desk!! I rearranged and now I am off to clean out the samples in my catalog binders. Looking forward to seeing you all on Sunday evening at 7PM for a fun Facebook Live! The first card uses the soon to be retiring Quite Curvy sentiment (#154430), the second card uses the retired Flower and Fields Sale-a-bration DSP and the Thanks sentiment is from the retiring Many Mates (#152633) which also has a coordinating die set – this is a great sentiment set!