Experimenting is fun, not necessarily productive.

So, I experimented with a bunch of stuff yesterday, and I only have this one card to show for it. And it wasn't even the product of most of my experiments!

One thing I did play with was rubbing Distress ink over an embossed background, and that worked out nicely. Then I decided the butterfly (The Alley Way Stamps, Fly By) needed a flight trail. Well you can't stamp the trail after you've embossed, so I tried to "wing it" (lol, I can't help myself). So I hand drew the flight trail. Hmmm.

Most of the rest of the experiments involved texture paint. Since I want to stain them later, they are all over the surfaces where I put them to dry yesterday. It may be a while before I get back to them.

Today I experimented with different backdrops for  the card photo.

How's this? Not so good? I thought so too.

It's another card for Operation Write Home, which is winding down a little. I still have this box I have been working on all year. Yes, I'm slow!

Buggy thanks!

I made 2 more thank-you cards over the weekend. I wanted to use up the critters from The Alley Way Stamps set called Fly By that I had colored up and cut a couple of weeks ago.

This was one of those times I tried to follow a sketch and it fought me the whole way. The dragonfly and butterfly are so interesting and colorful that the rest of the card needed to be simple. It wasn't until they were done that I noticed a grungy area at the top right of the dragonfly card. It is part of the patterned paper design, honestly I wasn't handling them with filthy paws.

Also, I dropped the "thanks" as I was trying to glue it down and glue seeped out around some of the edges. I tried to get it off with an eraser but I was only partially successful. I'm going to blame my summer cold. Yup, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

The "thanks" is cut from a die from Lawn Fawn.

My grand pillow experiment.

I got some red and white "pillow ticking" at JoAnn's yesterday, as well as a small pillow form stuffed with down alternative. I also got a bag of shredded foam. What you see in this picture is the old pillow (yuck!!) on the bottom left, with the shredded foam pillow above it, and the down alternative pillow to the right of it.

The fourth pillow, upper right, is shorter and stuffed with buckwheat hulls. I ordered it in July of 2011, and I just today opened the bag.

First of all, I think either the down alternative or the shredded foam pillow will do nicely as a replacement for old yucko there. I'll put both on the bed and see which one I reach for every night. That's fair, isn't it?

The buckwheat pillow will make a nice gift. I made some for the family 11 years ago and recently discovered some of them are still in use. Yikes!  I don't use buckwheat pillows, they are just too noisy.

They were all a little messy to stuff, but the buckwheat hulls escaped the furthest and the shredded foam is the clingiest.  The down alternative was like working with regular fiberfill, only slipperier.