Need a quickie card? RTU's to the rescue

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Okay, so my son tells me he is attending a two year old's birthday party but he didn't have time to buy a card or a gift. The two year old's father is a friend of his and was really pushing for a gift of some sort (just a little presumptuous on his part but I digress). I, who have absolutely NOTHING to do, decided I would make a quickie card. What? Me? A quickie card? Not a chance. I'm the one who spends fifteen minutes deliberating the placement of a decorative paper fastener. There was no way I was going to design a quickie card from scratch so I did the only thing I could do under the circumstances...I went straight to my RTU stash.

RTU stands for Ready To Use. It is my self-defined repository of all those odds and ends left over from other projects I had worked on, creative experiments I had tinkered with...just about anything that I couldn't bear to part with because I thought it would come in handy for a card someday. Sure enough, when I scrounged around in the depths of my creative detritus I found plenty of stuff with which to make a card sure to tickle any two year old girl's heart. In my card drawer I found the dark pink base card  with the pretty punched edge. My paper stash yielded the embossed Happy Birthday layer in pink and orange. The rosette was literally sitting on my table top for weeks, the remains of my first attempts at making rosettes. Fortunately it, too, had a punched edge. The large butterfly and the fern leaf were all leftovers from experimenting with my eCraft electronic cutter. The smaller butterflies had been punched out of scrap paper last year and had been fluttering around in my drawer ever since just waiting for me to notice them. Absolutely everything you see in the photo was ready and waiting for me to bring them all together. The inside of the card, which I neglected to photograph, had the sentiment "Make a Wish" stamped on a tag that also came from my RTU stash. This card only took me about half an hour and most of that time was spent in pulling together all the various pieces of this artistic puzzle and adding a little bling on the large butterfly. (Those rhinestones are applied by hand one by one.)

So I have learned that a severe shortage of time and limited supplies with which to work can spark the most creative ideas. I guess I'll have to dive into my craft drawers more often. Who knows what I might come up with?

Ballo ergo sum
- Gitana, the Creative Diva
Design team member for About Art Accents

Tea Time Birthday Card

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My husband made an unusual request of me last week. He asked me to create a birthday card for his employer. This first-of-its-kind request on his part took me off guard and presented me with a challenge. I now had to create a card that was suitable for a business relationship but personal enough to avoid appearing obligatory.

The birthday girl's favorite color is red (mine, too!) and she loves tea. I came up with this simple easel card layout featuring a stamp from About Art Accents Plate 244B - Tea Pot and Covered Tea Cup on a Tray. The bold red color accents the patterned washi paper. Gold edging gilds all curved edges and the intricate floral design on the teapot and cup are embossed with holographic embossing powder for a little extra bling. The kanji symbol in the lower right corner is the Chinese symbol for tea. The unique fold of this card allows it to stand like a painting on an easel so the recipient can display and view it.

My husband told me his boss loved the card and had made some noises about contracting me to create some cards or invitations for her. Who knows? Maybe I've got another client in the making.

Ballo ergo sum
- Gitana, the Creative Diva
Design team member for About Art Accents

Busy Time at the Senior Center

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As I mentioned in a previous post, the celebration of the spring season has begun at the Dorchester Senior Citizens Center have been concentrating on craft projects that incorporate a flower motif. Photos you see  here show some of the work we have done in recent weeks. During two craft sessions I had the ladies create beautiful three dimensional flowers on stems for the purpose of using them to decorate the main activity/dining room of the center. Using foam core boards and wrapping paper, I made a makeshift window box and arranged the flowers inside of it to make it appear as if they were growing out of the box. This box was then mounted on the soffit of the main room in between the floral panels I made several weeks ago.

All around the perimeter of the room, lights and paper lanterns in shades of pink, orange and white were hung, giving the room a very bright and colorful appearance, just the thing to shake off the last of winter's cold doldrums. Because I am only at the center one afternoon a week, it has taken me several weeks to get all these elements in place but it is coming together very nicely. The room feels brighter already.

Many thanks must be given to Materials for the Arts,  (MFTA) a division of the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs. This organization is responsible  for receiving donated materials from a variety of donors and making them available for art organizations and non-profit entities free of charge. Many of the materials used for the projects pictured on this page came from MFTA. The fabric paper used in making the flower petals, the foam core boards used to make the flower box, the tassel on the little purse card as well as the baby buttons used in the flower centers all came from materials for the arts. Even the main image and sentiment on the Victorian Rose card came from MFTA, taken from a brochure advertising different types of paper. Take a closer look at that Victorian card. Do you see the small gold buckle on the left of the satin ribbon? It's actually bra hardware - the kind used to make an adjustable strap. It also came from MFTA as do most of the envelopes used for all the cards I make with the ladies. If you are or know of a NYC-based organization that might be interested in accessing this great resource, just follow the link at the beginning of this paragraph to go directly to the MFTA website.


Ballo ergo sum
- Gitana, the Creative Diva
Design team member for About Art Accents

Celebrating A Life Together

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My sister Sue and brother-in-law Todd recently celebrated their 26th wedding anniversary and the event was marked with a family dinner hosted by my parents at their home. It was a simple affair to mark a grand achievement, one that I thought deserved a souvenir to commemorate the special occasion so I decided to create something that would be a lasting reminder of the day they got married. To that end I created  coordinating corsages for the two of them. (Oh, I know that men aren't "supposed" to wear corsages but what is a boutonniere if not a very small corsage?)

The corsages are created with a mix of miniature roses I made myself and manufactured elements in a gold and white color scheme. Her corsage features a small narrow ribbon bow imprinted with the words "Mr. and Mrs." and a white dove perched on the side of the golden bow. His smaller corsage features two golden rings affixed on the white plume just above the roses.

I also made corsages for my parents, the host and hostess. My mother loves all things green so her little roses are pale green with matching ribbon bows. My father's corsage is blue and white.

Wearing their anniversary flowers.

Seems I haven't stopped making paper flowers for a year now, starting with that massive floral project I did for my daughter's graduating class in 2010. Funny thing is that the more I make them, the more I like making them. I guess there are more flowers in my future for sure.


Ballo ergo sum
- Gitana, the Creative Diva
Design team member for About Art Accents

Bloom or Bust: The Celebration of Spring Begins

Stylized hydrangeas

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This has been a rather productive weekend for me. And well it should. After all, I sequestered myself in my basement workroom on Saturday for 15 hours, breaking only long enough to eat (such a bad habit), go to the bathroom (another time waster) and play the occasional computer game to take a break (time well spent).

 For this year I have made "light", both as a relative measurement of weight as well as an element of energy, my theme. In a previous post, I mentioned how my first senior craft project of the year was intended to start the new year off with light. If you have read any of my other blogs, you know I'm a gardener and a lover of nature. I love the advent of spring with its promise of warmer weather and its beautiful array of colorful flora and fauna. In my recent series of projects I have incorporated both light and nature through images of flowers and butterflies. Both are light in terms of weight, both are colorful, color being the chromatic expression of light energy, and both represent beautiful aspects of nature. This kind of work puts me completely in my element.

Detail of Floral Border Panels

One of the things I do at the Dorchester Senior Citizens Center where I volunteer is to seasonally decorate the main activity room.

This weekend I decided to create flowers...lots of them...for the purpose of decorating the center for spring. I was inspired by a recent purchase of craft foam flowers intended for a young child's craft project to create some colorful border panels to be placed along one of the center's walls above eye level.  As I was putting the flowers together as intended by the manufacturer, I realized there was so much more that I could do to make them more interesting so I colored, scored, folded, and glued. The more I embellished, the more invested I became in the project and the more pleased I was with what was taking shape. Here you can see some photos of the four border panels I completed this weekend as well as some stylized hydrangea blossoms that were running around in my head, begging to be created.

No post concerning the senior center would be complete without some pictures of my lovely ladies. Here you see them showing off the flowers they made during a recent crafting session. Just look at the beautiful bouquet they created. Those flowers are almost as pretty as the women who crafted them.

Ballo ergo sum
- Gitana, the Creative Diva
Design team member for About Art Accents