At the beginning of the month I got together with the South Burlington stamp club group. It really was great to see this small group and hear about everyone’s Christmas celebrations. We all had some small aspects of “normal” in our festivities, but definitely nowhere close to the “before times”. This group is so positive – we were all celebrating the joys that we did have and didn’t focus on what we missed. And we had a little celebration; one of our members has a new job!
I don’t normally go for cutesy kid-like stamps when I shop, but I immediately fell in love with the fun robots when I first looked at the new January – June catalog. My first thought was creating Valentine’s with this set, but there is the “HB2U” sentiment for birthday greetings. I think this set will be perfect to create cards for anyone – there are so many great robot movies and pop culture. My personal favorite robot movie is Pixar’s “WALL-E”, if you haven’t seen it I totally recommend it. On a personal front, we are big fans of the tv show “Battlebots”. My husband and son used to watch it together – many years ago – when I was taking a class on Tuesday evenings. Now that the show has been reincarnated, my husband and I watch it together. There’s some great crashing and destruction, but what I really love is that the contestants just love robotics and they are very supportive of each other. My personal favorite cast member is Faruq Tauheed. If you’re interested, the show is on the Discovery channel; put your geek on and check it out!
For this card I drew my inspiration from a sample from page 67 of the 2021-22 Annual Catalog. The card featuring the Peekaboo Farm stamps and DSP seemed like a great match for the images in the Nuts & Bolts stamp set. I did adjust a bit for my design – the biggest change is that I didn’t bump up the top panel, and I added a mat layer. I thought that lining up the images while raising the top layer would be a pain in the neck, and I wanted it to be as easy as possible.
The Picture This dies are fun to work with, and you can use them to cut both the images that go inside the circles (or rectangles) as well as the outside windows. We stamped and colored the robots and hearts, and then lined them up in the windows of the die to cut. One tip – cut a couple of images at a time to minimize the risk of shifting while running through the machine.
To assemble, glue down the layer with the windows (for this card it is Magenta Madness). Then you can glue the individual images inside the windows, add some embellishments and you’re good to go. It’s super easy and fun!
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