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Win your free SpaGirlGourmet Lip Kit from The Party Plan Coach at http://thepartyplancoach.com :)

Good luck!

Six months away from the scrap scene and I'm poking around a little...and there are so many COMPANIES I haven't even heard of! How the world turns! What should I check out first? (I'm optimistically anticipating a return to scrapping soon...!)

Egads, it's been so long since I logged in that I completely forgot my username and re-registered...oops! Y'all can ignore the registration from "LynnAnne" :). Wish I had some fun scrapbooking stuff to report..but I don't think I've done a page in months. My computer COMPLETELY died over the summer - thanks much for my Aunt Mindy for replacing it with a refurbished one for me, but all my digi files, photos, etc. have yet to find their way over to the 'new' one. I've been dying to scrapbook lately, though. I think in part because my Dad has been diagnosed with ALS, and we were able to visit him (the kids and me) a couple of weeks ago. Those photos, which may well be the last we have with him, are as precious as the visit was.

The kids are well - generally speaking, anyway, since they're all sick this weekend! - and Franklin is walking and saying a handful of words now: up, down, apple, cheese, ball, book...more to scrapbook if I could find it in me! I ought to head to the gallery for some inspiration...but I'm sort of procrastinating here instead of making up 'hostess packets' for Discovery Toys parties. Ian signed up back in April or so and business has been going so well we ended up doing it together. Not enough time in the day otherwise! (Well, maybe I'd still argue there's not enough time in the day...)

I'm a little afraid to head to the forums from here. It LOOKS so different here. Who will be the same? Who will be different? I can't believe it's 'only' been six or seven months since I've been here...it feels like a lifetime ago. I hope everyone else has been scrapping happily in the meanwhile :)

Have a great weekend!

Croppin' Paradise is having their first-ever Spring Fling online crop this weekend http://www.croppinparadise.com/forums -- I just signed up (referred by one of the Jewish-Scrapbooking DT, who's also on theirs). If you come to play, give my name in the referral thread, we both get crop credit for it Have a happy scrappy weekend!

If there's one thing I need reassurance of during a winter where the ground has been covered in snow without a break for as long as I can remember...it's that Spring really truly is still coming this year. THANK YOU so much to Tinkering Ink for their beautiful clear stamp set, Simply Spring, for taking me a couple of months into the future for a little while! Birds, flowers, soft silhouettes and delicate fonts take me right into the promise of warmer weather, and the easy-to-use stamps make it easy to sink into stamping and forget about the winter mess that's still outside my window!


Tinkering Ink's clear photopolymer stamps come on a 6x8" plastic storage sheet, in a clear plastic package that stores easily on a pegboard or can be easily converted for binder storage. The stamps cling well to an acrylic block, even after repeated use, and produce a crisp image even with the more delicate designs.

The set comes with four phrases (sentiments): "thank you," "a little bird told me..." "everybody loves a little something" and "HAPPY DAY." They're sized perfectly for cards, so that's where I started!

I first colored the stamps with a Copic (quick-dry solvent-ink-based) marker and stamped quickly to get a shadowy image of the solid bird silhouette stamp, then used a pigment ink to stamp the sentiment over it.



Tinkering Ink's clear stamps make it easy to place images and words exactly where they're needed to line up properly, which is especially welcomed when stamping multiple images for a background or stamping a sentiment into 'just' the right space on a card or layout. This 'thank you' stamp is placed over a background of light-colored floral designs in different sizes, with two of the bolder designs stamped on separate paper and attached as embellishments for a little dimension.



I suppose birds and flowers are reserved traditionally for 'girl' projects, but these designs have such a fresh feel to them - and my son's school photo from Kindergarten made him look like such a 'fresh face' - that I couldn't resist using the bird silhouette stamp again, with a couple of stamps of the flourish, in a bolder black. The clear stamps used with a clear acrylic block allowed me to see where ink had and hadn't taken when stamping over more than one layer of cardstock, so that I knew not to lift the stamp until the entire image was down.



This 11-stamp set retails for $24.99, and this is surely a case of 'you get what you pay for' - you can't find top quality stamps in a dollar bin. With the versatility and beauty of these designs, you can pull them out for project after project and forget about any wintery weather outside until it really IS spring! Enjoy!