notecards, notecards, notecards

so it's been a kind of low key week or two in the crafty department. m and i were both off work on saturday, which is incredibly rare for us (i work weekdays and he almost always works weekends) so we ended up going on a huge cleaning streak... clean laundry, clean kitchen, cleared-off dining room table, temporarily dog-hair-free vacuumed floors... and we realized that our bathtub is actually white, not scary 70's yellow like it had come to be (may i just say that this is god's gift to bathtubs). matt even cleaned and organized the fridge, which thrilled me so much i took a picture. oh it makes me happy even now that a few days later it's a little messier. that lovely fridge was the result of our computer committing tragic and sudden suicide, and my poor hubby being stuck at home on his day off with no projects to work on. i secretly love that this happened if only because now (albeit a couple hundred bucks later) we have a new computer. and did you see the fridge?

(side note about fridge contents... i adore ketchup. can you tell?)

it's been a heinous work week, well, the past two weeks really, and to take my mind off the stress of incessant annoying and angry phone calls that just won't stop i spent my breaktimes trying to totally blank out into creative zone. not actually making things obviously, but thinking and planning and scheming just a little. the results were that i came up with some new notecards that i was really happy with, coming soon to a petite shop near you:

and these new "melange" cards that i like so much i'm having a hard time thinking of putting them up for sale...

i especially love the brown. i liked them so much in the little 3x5s that i also made them in oversized 5x7s. the scraps are a little bit of everything from the scrap box in my studio... wrapping paper, scrapbook paper, ribbon bits, sheet music, wallpaper, lace, vellum, black and white calendar pages, and paper bag pieces.

i also ordered a custom hand stamp to stamp the backs of them with my shop name and url. i tried my first foray into stamp carving before ordering one, but it was definitely too big to use on the cards. i did this one with my huge xacto-like craft knife thingy (which wasn't so exacto of a technique- the top of the b suffered a near-fatal slice) but it was really fun and turned out decently.

and it's already been good for stamping larger, packaging type stuff. i like the very obviously handmade printing quality to it. kind of a distressed look. these are vintage button magnet sets. they're the other thing i've gone crazy making these past few weeks.
it's funny how i start an entry like this thinking i don't really have anything new to share, but it's like one thing makes you think of another, which makes you think of another... which makes me think i really do craft night and day without realizing it. i feel so productive! i'll still be posting new stuff in the shop the next few weeks. i've been trying to post one new thing every day. i think for now i'm headed off to enjoy my lovely, clean, new-looking bathtub and one of my favorite free perks of my job!