Probably the only card posts I will make

There are those that find joy in making cards.  Those who find delight in finding just the right paper.  In stamping or drawing or cutting or punching or brayering or embellishing or [insert any number of other techniques in here].  In adding ribbons or distressing or embossing.  In sort, creating disposable* pieces of artwork to give to another.  I am not one of those people.

Which is odd really, because both my Mum and my sister are.  My mum has a room devoted to craft, 99% is for cardmaking.  The other 1% is all the bits left over from her dabbling in a wide variety of other crafts that I raid when appropriate (why no, I have no idea where I got my crafty genes from :P).  My sister is following in her footsteps with only her smaller budget and three small children to keep her supplies and output smaller.  I'll see if I can convince them to let me show some of their pieces in future posts.

Myself, I just make cards when I need to- which basically translates to when I need to give either Mum or my sister a card for birthdays.  When I'm giving a card to someone else I just go and take a card from their finished boxes.  It has become something of a running gag in my family when I do make a card (once I wrote 'DIY card' on a plain card and enclosed it with the pile of craft supplies I bought Mum for her birthday).  Other times I get lucky and use a card to mount something such as a piece of embroidery such as the embroidered card kit I made a month or so ago.

So basically my point is, this is not going to be a blog that talks about card making a lot.  But yesterday my sister held a Stampin' Up party (for those not in the know this is a company that operates on the party plan model, like Tupperware, and sells card and scrapbook supplies).  So partly to be a supportive sister, partly out of curiosity I went and I made two cards.  So without further ado, here are the only two classic cards I'm likely to post.

The first one I like- it's a nice birthday card that's not terribly kiddy or gender biased.  The Happy Birthday was stamped and then the letters water-coloured in.  The penants were made using a stamp and punch combo that look pretty but would cost $100 to get the set (and since I'm not into making cards, that would work out to a very large cost per card so no, I didn't buy them).  And the paper, ribbon and embellisments are also from the company.

The second card was more of a gift tag and... well let's just say that I made it later in the night and the concentration was well and truely gone.  So after stamping the back, I turned the card over and stamped the front.  Upside down.  So then I tried to fix it by using snowflake stamps. And then the glue splurted out.  And I tried to colour in the stamp with the thick end of a pen.  And... 

 Oh well, perhaps I'll end up using it for a Kris Kringle card or something.  Or bury it deep in a secret location and never speak of it again!

So while I did make one nice card, the party did not convince me that I really would like card making if only I gave it a chance.  And even if I did, the stuff was far too expensive for my tastes (a typical set of rubber stamps was around $40).  While nice quality, that's too rich for my blood.  If I spend that much money on a craft at one time I'd like to see more stuff or know I'll get a lot of use out of the stuff.