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Monday 22 September 2014

...Creative Blog hop

 Good morning folks! Happy Monday to you! I'm up early to squeeze in a blog post before today's sneak peek!

I was tagged by my lovely friend Julee Tilman last week in her Creative Blog Hop post ! Julee said such lovely things about me that I couldn't say no! :) The idea behind the creative blog hop is that you answer a few questions about yourself and then nominate 3 more folks to keep the hop going!

Ok so here goes:

What am I working on now?

Well I am right in the middle of prepping for the September release - I'm doing a lot of unexciting and uncreative stuff, like adding products to the store, struggling with SEO on the store website, always a challenge to me, and setting up a new app on the store to allow me to run promotions more efficiently! Creatively speaking I am supposed to me making samples also...and there has been some usage of texture paste, which is pretty new to me...

How does my work differ from others in my genre?

I like to think of myself as a neat and tidy stamper - I love to stamp crisp sharp images. I don't use a lot of embellishments in my work - in the beginning this was because I didn't have a budget for what I used to think of as add-ons. I fell in love with the clear photopoymer stamps that were only available in USA at the time and so I had to be pretty canny with my cash, shipping was expensive and I really had to stretch my pennies to get the goodies I wanted from USA. this frugal approach became a habit and I really have to push myself to use embellishemnts - I see oodles of beautiful things, but an embellishment really has to bite me for me to buy it. I did succumb to ribbon, I do love ribbon and I have a small cupboard just for that purpose, but cutting it up for use makes me wince... Julee once sent me some fabulous crushed seam binding, it is so gorgeous that it may never be used! In contrast I have only one small drawer containing a few embellishments, it's an area I need to work on...lol.

Why do I create what I do?

OOOh... that's an interesting question... I make cards because I have hands that really need to be making something and a brain that is always thinking about what I can make - Cardmaking attracted me because I can do it in a relatively short space of time. I used to quilt, but when baby number 3 came along home - life got a little too hectic and I was no longer able to carve out hours at a time for myself. Stamping cards offered a way to create something useful that I could do in much less time than quilting. Once I started I was hooked and soon began thinking up ideas for stamp designs, I could see endless possibilities.

How does my creative process work?

My card making process has changed over the years - I used to create with no pressure, I was using stamps I had bought and was free to do whatever I liked, and so I would have begun with the stamps and picked a colour to work with, then I would have made up a piece to use as a focal point and maybe stamped a background to use with it, I like mats and I picked up my sponging habit from Julee - can't seem to lose that, but it is such a satisfying thing to do....

Lately when I'm making a card I'll be using my own stamps and a lot of times I will know exactly what I want to do with the stamps from even before they are produced, so I will refer back to a notebook to ideas and sketches I jotted down while I was designing the stamps.

I have a sponge brain and literally anything can set me off so I have notebooks everywhere. Designs for stamps can come from anywhere, something my kid said, something from my own childhood - like The witch in Halloween party, she is like a combination of ideas from all the witch stories I ever heard as a child. I have a pretty graphic imagination and my brain seems to translate ideas into shapes, a particular curve, a certain texture. Sometimes it's fairly instant but there are plenty of things in my notebooks that have taken a couple of years to emerge as stamps.

Well I'm about done waffling about myself and it's time for me to nominate 3 folks to carry on the hop:

My nominations are also LIVE as Julee's were because I just did not get around to asking folks in time either!! (thanks to Mr Verve for the idea!) I have had the best design teams ever, all the current and past ladies are folks that i admire so much, but I already know a little about them, so I'm going to nominate 2 ladies that I'm only just getting to know, and one lady who is a longstanding hero to me - I admire their style and I think it'll be fun to read about their processes

First up I'm going to nominate:

Next I'm going to nominate: Aneta Matuszewska of Artisant  Aneta, just stuns me every time I stop by her blog, fascinating creations, beautifully made and  photographed.

For my last nomination today Kimberly Crawford of For the love of paper - Kim was one of the first stampers that I happened upon and she is still one of my stamping heroes!

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