Male Celebrate Card

Instead of working on getting more of the existing cards documented, I created a new celebrate card tonight using male oriented colors I picked out from a Recollections cardstock pack. You might recognize this as the brand one of the major craft store chains is selling. Using these as the inspiration I went looking for a stamp I could use and settled on a 5 1/4" long celebrate stamp with dots on the end.  That meant strips on the card. To make them more interesting I rounded the corners on one and used different border widths. It was too simple though.

I went looking for something else in my clear stamp collection I could put on the card. I found plenty of flowers and curly things, some purses, lipstick but not many things a guy would be happy to see on his card. I thought about some Tim Holtz stamps but didn't see them working here and finally I noticed one that defined celebrate. I used it to versamark celebrate onto the background.

It's really a simple layout recipe that I've used over and over again, but turning the background into celebrate paper that coordinates with the stamp, rounding the corners and varying the widths on the mats make it totally unique.

Click here to see the card.

A new start!

I was publishing cards using my original blog card-topia, but a free blog format just didn't allow me to do what I wanted to do. There are other places to post them, if you used that manufacturer's product but I tend to use a mix of products and a lot of them were purchased with 40%-50% off coupons so there is no real suitable place to post a lot of the cards I have made.

People keep telling me I should submit them to magazines and if I worked at tracking all the calls for designs and making cards to those themes, I probably could manage to get stuff published. On the other hand, I could also just be the publisher. I could make a website where everything published would be available all the time. It's searchable. It's at your fingertips. It's formatted the way I want to see it. It's not limited by what the off the shelf hosting package can do. It's right there on your mobile device or on the computer, not in a huge pile in the closet or on a bookshelf. It's also free to the viewer.

So I payed the money and registered sharedcards.com. I payed the money and got a commercially hosted server for the website and I have spent the last week working out an initial version of the website. I have started it off with 21 of my cards. Some of them you may recognize from the previous blog, but you will be able to see them much better now. Some are ones I scanned for the blog but never posted and 3 are new ones created this week. Right now I'm the only one who can post things to it but that will change after the construction dust settles and anyone will be able to share cards.

Check it out and let me know what you think as a comment here.