Christmas Tags!

So I have decided to live! I got all moved in to my new apartment. Just yesterday I finished putting all my scrappy stuff into it's places so that I could work. After dinner last night, I decided I needed to start playing so I pulled out my stamps and made some tags.

This picture shows the tag in progress. It was stamped with a Stampendous rubber cling stamp called Cling Tweet Top Hat and colored in with distress ink (I used a blender pen to color). The berries are dotted with burgundy stickles and after I distressed the tag I coated it with Golden Goddess Glimmer Glam

Here's the final result:

  This morning I wanted to do something special so I made another, larger tag using two sets of stamps from Lawn Fawn, Smitty's ABCs and Let it Snow. First I stamped a sentiment from let it snow all over my tag using Weathered Wood Distress Ink. Then I used the same ink to distress around the body of the tag, then spritzed it to within and inch of it's life with Perfect Pearls Spray (in Perfect Pearl)

I stamped out several of the trees in Forest Moss Distress Ink and then coated them with a layer of Peeled paint distress stickles. I stamped out the hills on another Tag and then cut out the hill and coated it in a layer of glue and added Flowersoft in Polar White. I stamped out the Merry Christmas Sentiment onto that tag where I cut out the hill and then coated the sentiment with Burgundy Stickles (I used a toothpick to do this) then cut a flag shape in one end and edged it with Weathered Wood Distress ink. The hill, Trees and banner are popped up on dimensional adhesive. And I spelled out the to and from using Smitty's ABCs. The colons are drawn with a marker. 

The finished tag in all it's sparkly glory ;)

Thanks so much for looking!

Hold the phone!!! (or... Pack the truck!)

I have not been around much this year, and for that... I am sorry. I have made more cards and little minis as gifts but forgot to take photos. I have a new piece of equipment or two that you will be seeing a WHOLE lot of in the future ;)... but for now I have an announcement.

I am moving. I am moving this weekend. I am moving this weekend from Memphis, TN to Annandale, VA to start a new life. This Saturday marks one year to the day when my husband "disappeared." He "left" to go to his grandparent's house for the weekend, and that evening they called to see what time he should get there. He should have been there hours earlier than they called. The police found him the next day. They took him to see a doctor. I'll spare all the details, but I took him home after he saw the physician. Just after Thanksgiving, 2011 he ended his life.

I've had quite a bit going on. I flaked on first swap ever, and I still feel bad about that, but I think all of the ladies understand. It took a long time for me to get back into creating. I wanted to do something, ANYTHING way before I finally was able. I have made and have it in me to make some more hardcore therapy type pages about my feelings on the subject. It really makes me feel better.

If sad/bad things happen, use your medium... wether it's paper/paint/digiscrapping... the medium doesn't matter,  but your health and sanity do. You can keep the work private or you can choose to share. I have another blog, it's just a therapy blog. For all my whining and poor me stuff, that helped too. And so you know, I did see a professional until she dismissed me. She said I was welcome to come back at any time, but that I was doing a wonderful job working through my grief myself. She gave me tools, exercises. And I was willing to try, even the things I thought were so STUPID, and how could ANYONE wake up on a special day and KNOW they were GOING to PLAN to devote some time to just grieving. But told me to plan on giving in to the sad for a while on special days. And when the first one came around, it worked. I planned for some sad. I had my little breakdown. The rest of the day was fine. I wrote about it in the therapy blog. And moved on.

I'm moving away. I AM leaving so many friends and people I truly love and care about. I am so thankful to have them in my life. This wonderful thing called internet insures that we can chat and visit on some sort of regular schedule. That's how I keep up with them for the most part already. I've started telling them that we can crop together on google+.

You sometimes don't know what people go through in their private lives. My close friends have learned so much more about me this year. The biggest compliment I received was from a really close friend from my college days who told me one day that it was really good seeing "Charity" come out again. I hadn't realized how much of who I WAS had disappeared over the years. I also had forgotten there was anyone who ever knew just single me. That comment made me feel SO GOOD!

It let me know that what I was doing was working not only to myself, but to others.

:)