My Challenge

As I was sitting at my desk yesterday, finishing off some cards for a card swap, it occurred to me that, since I had bought so many new stamps while I was away, I needed to make sure that I used them - at  least once!!
So I issued myself a little challenge - to use every stamp at least once during the next month. Given that some of the stamp sets I bought had at least 8 stamps, and I got quite a few sets... that is a lot of stamps to use.

So, here is the result for the first day of my challenge:

The Tanda Teaser for this week is a Man card.
This is one of Tanda's stamps from the Retro Men Set 1. I stamped it using the black Memento pad, cut it with the largest nestabilities oval, then used the same die to cut the backing, which is a leather-look paper from some scraps that I had. I also embossed the die cut to provide an edge to the piece.

Layered on a cuttlebug embossed card outlined with a gold marker, then again onto a brown card. I cut the corner pieces from the same scrap of leather-look paper with a Martha Stewart photo corner punch. The whole was then attached to the beige card.

The sentiment is from a Dark Room Studio set that I bought in Australia last year.

The second piece is an ATC book that I made for my alphabet ATCs.

For the Card Making World New Zealand Crafters Group, we are currently running an alphabet ATC swap. I was thinking about how to store the ones I have made but not sent and I found the instructions for making a little folder that contains 4 ATCs. Carol from Hamilton sent the instructions to me and I found that you could join several together to make a book.

The cover detail includes a stamp from the Les Petite Whimsies collection by Stampington and Company which I stamped on card that I had already coloured with Tattered Rose, Victorian Velvet and Weathered Wood Distress Inks. I masked the image, then stamped swirls with WWDI and little cogs with VVDI. The little cogs stamps was from my friend Zoe, who designed a set of stamps especially for our meet at Wantage.

I coloured some swirls that I had cut with the Cricut to attached to the front with brads, along with a label.
I made 7 little folders and sewed them together through the spines, then attached to the spine of the cover, along with a ribbon to add some more colour and texture.

I attached pink ribbons to the cover, then added the two cards I had made for the decorations.

Quite pleased with the result, but always room for improvement.

I will do a tutorial on this and share it with the other NZ Crafters for them to store their ATC collections.

I also made some other cards, which I have coloured using my Copics, but will share these next week as they are for the card swap and I don't want to let the cat out of the bag, so to speak!!!
Total new stamps used yesterday: 5
Enjoy!