A Good Day for Cards

(click to enlarge)

(*see note below)

I belong to a rubber stamping group that has been in existence for over 11 years.  Although the group's members are currently all female, we have had talented gentlemen members in years past. Our youngest active member is in her early twenties, the most mature in her mid-80's.  A faithful group of folks, many of them charter members of the group, meet on one Saturday afternoon each month to practice new --or old -- card-making/designing techniques or to demonstrate new tools and materials used in the craft, to swap handmade cards, and to catch up with what's been going on in our lives since the last meeting.   Eighteen of us gathered this afternoon, and it was great fun, as usual.

Since I had cards 'on the brain,' so to speak, when I got home I started looking back through my computer files at the hundreds and hundreds of images of cards I've made and received during the past 11 years. I selected a few (of the cards that I made myself) to create the above collage.   

My taste in rubber stamp images is eclectic, to say the least. I require only an interest in or appreciation of the art.  Some tickle my funny bone: the image in the lower left hand corner of the collage is one of my favorites.  Art?  Maybe. Or Not.  Whimsey? Definitely.  I presently own a great many rubber stamp images of various sorts, having acquired them with the same abandon that I once reserved for the purchase of books.

I must have been behind the door when God passed out creative/artistic abilities.  There seems to be a broken connection between what my eyes see and what I can do with my hands.  I simply cannot transfer what I see to any sort of media. I don't sketch; I don't paint (except walls and woodwork); I once tried sculpting in clay - hahahahahah! All I got was dirty hands!

I truly enjoy my stamps, inks, papers, ribbons and other embellishments, and the physical act of creating cards or other art work using images that I could not have produced through my own abilities.  

* Insofar as I can remember correctly, since some years have passed since I created most of these cards, copyrights to the images shown above are held by: Hero Arts; Stamp It!; Magenta; Red Castle Rubber Stamps; Personal Stamp Exchange; B-Line Designs; Stampamania; and Penny Black, Inc.

That's about it for this (almost) end of the first month of the year.

Tomorrow is also a day.