Introducing "I.C." cards...

Not sure if my 3 blog readers have noticed, but it's been kind of quiet on the ol' Blog Front in the last few months. I could yammer on about being busy - but come on....pretty much EVERYONE is busy and I probably have an "average" busy-ness level of life. Sooooo it comes down to how lame a person is - or how I like to look at things.....what a person CHOOSES to do. As a stamper, I did hit a major "stampers block" and combined with a few other things, creating cards just wasn't a very high priority.

Never fear, I wasn't just lounging around eating bon-bons (although that sounds like fun)....I was pretty busy. I made several gifts for Christmas: 18 scarves (crochet); 3 pairs of earrings; and a couple of ornaments. Creepella, Heidi and I spent a few days on a "Girls Only" Vacation - loads of fun!! I worked on several stitched projects (I'm nearly finished with one....I'll post it when I'm done). Work continues to be a nightmare and I spend inordinate amounts of time there trying to shovel through the mountains of work that threaten to avalanche. By the time I get home, any hope of getting the creative juices flowing is pretty hopeless...sigh... When I don't zonk out, I'm usually doing something that doesn't require much effort (crochet or stitching) - that way I'm doing something creative (aka therapeutic) but I'm pretty much planted on the couch.

But finally, during time off after Christmas, I had a stern talk with myself and asked, "What the.....????" I have way too much $$$ invested into stamping - I need to hoist myself up off of the couch and back into the stamp room and start STAMPING. Which I tried to do - however I did little to no stamping.....I dinked around.....and dinked and dinked.......and then I finally realized I was in an official Stamping Funk - no ideas, nothing was inspiring me - zippoooooo. In desperation, my eyes flew around the stamp room - grasping at ANYTHING that would give some pathetic thread of inspiration......and my eye did spy........a stack of stamping magazines!! And so I selected 5 of them, got a pencil and pad of Post-It notes and 2 different types of tabs and looked at each page and pondered. By the time I was finished, I had MANY tabs and Post-It notes in each magazine.

I've wrestled with the idea of "copying" cards......nearly hanging my head in shame - but Creepella put a clever spin on things - she reminded me that I get the magazines because I enjoy looking at other cards and stampers get inspired from one another so I'm not really "copying" cards......they're "inspiring" me - and so they'll now be known as I.C. (Inspired Cards). I'm hoping to get my act together enough so that I'll also include the magazine or blog listing for each I.C. card.

This card was inspired by one that I saw on a blog.....but I think instead of the letters in the circle tabs there were hearts and the sentiment said something about "love".

Hoping to get back into the Stamping Saddle on a regular basis - we shall see.......

• Stamps: "Birthday"/PTI; "HAPPY" (alpha set)/CTMH
• CS: Colored CS/CTMH
• Inks: CTMH & Memento
• Misc: Ribbon/A Muse; Circle punches & corner rounder; Spica pen (Black)