I recently convinced my husband that we needed to replace our worn, stained carpet in our bedroom with some type of laminate, tile, or hardwood. He agreed but would never make a move to get it started. The next time my elderly kitty got sick in our bedroom, I cleaned the two spots she made with a potent bleach cleaner, and it seemed to do the trick of getting him moving on the floor remodel. He finished it Friday night and we moved our furniture back in on Saturday morning. I decided it was time to get rid of the decorative boxes that held my beading supplies and were sitting neatly stacked in 2 corners of our bedroom floor. After all, I haven't made any jewelry in the past 2 years since I started paper crafting. I used to make different kinds of jewelry using different mediums, and just as your DSP and card stock builds up over time, so do beads and materials used to make this or that. I had a box for leather projects, a box for Chainmaille projects, a box for seed beads projects, a box for gemstones and stringing projects, etc. I wanted to go through each box before I gifted it to someone, because I wanted to keep just enough that if I got the itch to make something or found a pattern I couldn’t resist, I’d have it on hand.
I’m a sun lover and I like to sit at our pool every weekend and read, do research, eat popsicles, and think about what I can do to grow my paper crafting business. So, I took all of these boxes outside so I wouldn’t have to miss out on the sun, and I started going through them making piles like “keep,” “give,“ “this goes somewhere else,” etc. I had a big ole mess.
I had been at it for about 2 hours when my husband showed up with a visitor, someone he wanted me to meet – his old boss from his first job back when he was 16 years old. Now, I’m 57 years old, and I still wear a bikini, but it's definitely not attractive like it may have been when I was 20 something. But still, when I'm at my house, I wear what I want to. So, there I am among all that bead clutter, sweating and feeling just a little bit uncomfortable in my nakedness but meeting this gentleman just the same. He wanted to know what in the heck I was doing, so I explained to him that I had switched my love of beading to paper crafting and I was going through my old stash to pare down and gift it to someone else.
He and my husband eventually went inside to check things out, and my husband showed him my craft room and some of the cards I make. I continued on with my sorting, and before the gentleman left, he came back outside and “commissioned” me to make him a card for his girlfriend, Penny. He said her birthday is at the end of August, and he thinks it would be so special to give her a hand made card. He asked me how much I charged for my cards, and I hesitated before giving my usual answer, (“I don’t sell them, but I would love to teach you how to make your own.” or “I don’t sell them because it's hard to put a price on them, but I’ll gift one to you.”) and I simply said, I usually get $5 for them, and he gave me $7 and thanked me kindly.
All of that to say, I made this special card for the gentleman's girlfriend Penny from the FREE Hand Penned paper in the SAB catalog. I used the Hand Penned stamps and colored it with Polished Pink and Smoky Slate blends. He wanted her name stamped on it, so I was grateful to still have the retired “Make a Difference” stamp set to stamp her name.
Sometimes, it’s just wild to think how stuff happens – good, bad, or indifferent. It’s often a trickle effect from another decision you made at some time or another. My decision to use the bleach cleaner on the cream colored carpet so my husband would make a move for some new flooring made me clean out my beading supplies which made the gentleman ask me what in the world was I doing and my answer made him want to buy a hand made card for his girlfriend lol. Maybe she will eventually become a customer :o)
Thanks for reading my blog today! Check out my online classes I'm offering right now by visiting my home page at www.justpaperllc.com and click on the top menu "Online Classes." Subscribe to my blog or newsletter and get a free template for a braided card technique. You'll receive the template in a thank you email from me. If you have any questions about the template, there's a short video on my blog post here that shows you how to use it.
Take care,
Kim Webb
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