Metallic blooms

Quick post this morning. I am swamped today! I wanted to share this quick card using the metallic pencils from Stampin' Up! I think these pencils are awesome and they don't get much publicity. Part of the reason for that , in my opinion, is that they are one of the few items that don't come in the traditional SU colors. They have colors all their own. Do not despair! The colors are gorgeous and pair up easily with many SU colors. In this card, I stamped the image with Basic brown onto whisper white. I then used various colors to intensify the hash marks and lines in the stamped image. I did these fairly heavy to get a lot of lead on there. Then I used a paper towel to 'smudge' the colors around and fill in the flower and leaves. (These pencils don't erase well, but you can get a bit off if you are patient with the eraser.) In person, you can really see a shimmer on the flower. I mounted the image onto a card base of Pale Plum, scalloped the top edge with some shears and layered a piece of whisper white inside for a sentiment. The words on the front are from a hostess set last year, stamped in basic brown and put into some hodgepodge hardware. I used the tombow liquid adhesive to put the oval into the frame and it worked great! One more use for that stuff! The ribbon is white tafetta. A quick easy card that has a lot of bang for it's buck.

I also wanted to show you how my picture organizing is coming along. I found these photo holders at Joann.com. They are my favorite!! They are made by Cropper Hopper, of course. They have removable dividers, tabs you can write on and the bottom opens to hold oversized pictures. It is amazing how much room all those little envelopes take up. I am tossing them all! I took all my negatives from 'before digital' and put them into sleeves with dates. Not only does this picture storage system take up less space, I can easily flip through the pictures and find what I want. How do you store YOUR photos?