Becoming a Better Sharer

My family will be the first to tell you that I'm not a very good sharer. Since they are the ones who know me best, trust them. One person I've met this past year who IS a good sharer is Amy Westerman. She has a blog called Heartfelt Greetings, and one day I saw this post and loved the holly image! Amy and I are both in the position where we need to watch our stamping spending, so I wrote her to ask if she might be willing to swap something--several images of that holly for 1 lb. of Starbucks coffee. She agreed, and this came in my mail several days ago:

She sent me the card AND the images! I have to be at work at 11:30 this morning, so I knew I had a little more time than usual to play, so I got busy after I got back from taking Michael to school.

Amy's a master at pairing and incorporating designer paper into her card layouts, so I knew my card needed to have some of that. Amy had included several pieces of dp that had been stamped with just the vase image, so I started there.

I love how cool things can happen if you just let your sense of design take you where it wants to go. I started by coloring in the dots on some red and vanilla dp, and using Old Olive as a base. After I played with some strips of dp for awhile and getting those the way I wanted them (Amy had posted a layout from PageMaps yesterday, and that was floating around in my head), I started working on the main image.

I colored it, put the pieced vase on it, and popped it up on dimensionals. Then I decided it needed a little shimmer (notice that Amy's has golden shimmer goin' on, thanks to a gold pen), so I added gold eyelets. Then I thought I'd thread some gold thread through those eyelets. No, what about that lovely Old Olive narrow organdy ribbon? OK. As I did the first threading, the ribbon folded itself in half, and so then I had to do it through all 4 like that!

I tacked the ribbon down on the back to hold it where I wanted it, and this is what that looked like! I used sticky strip instead of mono adhesive, partly because I'm out of mono, and partly because past experience has taught me that ribbon doesn't stick as well to that!

It was coming together, but it needed more bling, so I added SU!'s gold elastic cord around the neck of the vase and inbetween the dp strips, securing each of the latter with a glue dot for easy tying.

Here's my finished product, and I couldn't be happier! Stamping nourished my spirit this morning, and I needed that therapeutic touch today. Thanks, Amy, for being so generous! You blessed my life today.

I'm going to make an effort to share something today, if at all possible, and I challenge you to do the same!