Cards for Heroes is now Operation Write Home

They changed their name and website... still the same group and the same valuable role, just a different name. They are also now officially a 401C group, so any donations you give to them to help support their operations are tax deductible!

http://www.operationwritehome.org/

I gave them my own support just last week - I mailed off my third box of cards, and this time I used a BIG priority box. I sent in 200 blank cards with assorted themes, plus 20 Any Hero cards... and the amazing thing was that the box was still not full. There would have been room for another hundred cards in the box, but I was out of time to make them before the Halloween mailing deadline! The smallest size priority box only holds 40 cards, and you can squeeze 60 into the priority envelopes, so a bigger box is a big cost saving if you have time to make more than about 50 cards.

If anyone wants to make cards for them, here are their mailing deadlines for the rest of the year - Thanksgiving October 5 (so you've got one week left!)
- Hannukah Nov 1
- Christmas Nov 1

Any Christmas/Hannukah/Seasonal cards mailed in before October 15th will go into a special challenge and somebody will win some lovely stamps to play with... so start creating!

Of course you can send in birthday, greetings, 'thinking of you' etc any time. They ALWAYS need cards that say things like 'I love you' and 'I miss you', especially in seasonal colours... I just bought a rubber stamp on Ebay that says 'Thinking of you and missing you too' so I'm all set.

A scrapping frenzy!

I haven't done a scrapbook layout for well over a year... but we had an empty bulletin board to decorate at church, and I've been meaning to make a Church scrapbook basically ever since we joined the church! I've just never had the motivation to get started and do it until now. I asked about old photos of the church and our Elder told me there was a whole box of them in the office, so I grabbed them last night after Bible study and took them home with me. Talk about a bonanza! It's a big jumble of course... but it's fascinating to see pictures of what the church was like long before we joined it. We've only been members for five years, and the church has been established for over fifty! It was originally in an entirely different location, and alas there weren't any pictures of what that church looked like, but there was a picture of 'our' building when it was up for sale, and photos of them putting in the gardens etc etc. I started working on the photos at eight this morning, and by the time I called it quits and went to the church to put up my finished pages it was four o'clock... and I had seven completed layouts in my hand, plus one that I made earlier in the week. Because I was in a hurry the layouts are pretty simple and I'm not entirely happy with the last one I made, but I'm still pleased with myself for getting them accomplished at all! Our new inkjet printer is as cheap as we could get, but it prints out very reasonable results. I've attached the page that I'm the most pleased with - our church history. I pieced the history together from a couple of old church directories (one from the 60's, one from the 80's, and what I was told about the move... but what I'm most pleased with is how far I stretched a very small piece of dark blue cardstock. I used blues/yellows on all the layouts and I tried to use the same papers on more than one page to help tie them all in together.

Altered Tissue boxes and picture frames

I haven't forgotten about this blog... but I've been busy doing other things and I haven't had time to sit down and do anything noteworthy. I'm thinking of trying a 'card a day' project to get myself into the habit of blogging more regularly.

The visitor counter on this thing must be way out of whack. I just can't believe that a blog that's only been running for a month and that has as few entries as this one could possibly have had so many visitors. Last time I looked at it it was sitting at about 100 and now it's magically jumped to 11000 and something?! It's feelgood but I'd rather have something accurate!

And now for my crafty project of the day... I decided to make some altered picture frames for our church. I got a pair of frames from the dollar tree. One of them had a broken glass but that's okay - I didn't want it anyway because my collages aren't flat. I pulled the glass out of the frames and glued a sheet of cardstock straight onto the cardboard backing for the frame. Then I pulled out some co-ordinating papers, a couple of rubber stamps, and some stickers, and fired up my laser printer to print out a couple of well-known verses.

It didn't occur to me to photograph the creation process, but here's the finished articles. Two pictures to hang on the wall, and I used the scraps and leftover paper to decorate a pair of matching tissue boxes to go with them.


Here's the front side of the tissue boxes... the coloured butterflies are cut from a wallpaper border and the square flowers are a recycled greeting card. The other decorations are stickers.


And here's the other side of the boxes...

Lastly, here are the pictures.

Found Furniture is the best!

I haven't forgotten about this blog... I've just been very busy for the last week doing some baking for Church, so I haven't had any time for crafting. A friend's husband died a few weeks ago and his memorial service was on Saturday, and I offered to bake for it. Now that the funeral's over my catering responsibilities are at an end (for now) and I'll have some more time to get back into my craft room.

I signed up for an inchie swap last month and I whipped up the inchies yesterday, and dropped them in the mail. On the way back from the post office I noticed what looked like a bookcase out by the skip behind our building. Closer investigation revealed it to be a large shoe-rack. Hooray! I've wanted one of those for ages, so I dragged it upstairs and cleaned it off. It's not in perfect condition, but you can't tell when it's shoved under my desk in my craftroom, and you won't be able to tell at all once it's filled up with craft supplies.



Ignore the mess on top of the desk... the relevant part is the storage shelf underneath. As you can see it's the perfect size to fit under the desk! And the total cost to me was zero dollars and just a few scrapes to my shins as I dragged the thing up the stairs. It's not heavy, but it's tall and the back has come off it, so the rough presswood was scratching me up at every step. But it was worth it. I keep most of my craft supplies in those el cheapo shoeboxes you get at the dollar tree, and they're piled up all over the place in my craftroom. This rack will store twenty of them at my fingertips! That's a LOT of supplies! Plus it frees up space on my bakers rack for more awkward-to-store items. I'm going to have fun figuring out how best to rearrange everything.