Another Quickie

Hello Hello

Good Morning from the Midwest! I'll tell you the weather here is crazy, yesterday it was in the mid 60's, this morning there is a light dusting of snow covering most of the roof-tops in our neighborhood. I wish Mother Nature would make up her mind.

Anyhow for today I wanted to share another of the Frameworks by Tim Holtz in his Alterations line. This particular one is called Courtyard and is probably my favorite one of the bunch but I haven't tried the Honeycomb, Chevron or the Lattice yet so I'll get back to you on that when I do. 

On the card front and inside on the back of the card front I used an older Quick Cuts die that is called Las Vegas I think, it's been discontinued as far as I know but it makes for an interesting detail within my card. My favorite way to use this die though is to take the smaller diamond cut-out shape and fold it in half and stick it to a tooth pick and make it a pennant. 

For the 'Happy' sentiment I used one of my letter stamp sets, stamped out H-A-P-P-Y on creme card stock then used two different sizes of small circle punches to punch them out. The letters I punched using the smaller circle and then I punched the larger circle out of black card stock so that I could layer the letter circles and have them stand out. For the 'Birthday' part of the sentiment - the black connected circles is all one piece and one of the dies so on this one I only had to use the smaller of my circle punches to get my letters...then I added them right to the die-cut piece using tiny glue dots. Doing either of these methods is a go-to for me, I like the results a lot and it's quick and easy. I get the use out of both stamps and punches and I don't have to purchase any tiny letter stickers if I don't want to. I'm thinking of maybe trying to find a small square punch for this purpose too but I haven't yet.
Anyways that's all I have today, hopefully I've given you a couple of ideas on how to think outside the box and use those older things in your stash. In my opinion so long as you continue to try to find ways to incorporate those items into your new processes they will never become a 'waste of money', it's only when we 'give up' on certain products that they become a burden. So this week I encourage you to pull out some of those older tools and/or embellishments and see if you can think outside the box and re-invent new ways of using them. I would also love it if you'd come back and share what you've figured out. 
In the meantime, thank you for droppin' in, I appreciate it. Hope all of you have a wonderful week ahead, and make sure to check back in later this week...
I'll be sharing my very first mixed media piece that I did several months ago, totally love it still and I think you will as well.
Thanks again!
just B