A Halloween Card for Clean & Simple Tuesday (on Wednesday)

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Hi friends. I have an awfully cute Halloween card for you today for my Clean & Simple Tuesday Series on Wednesday. My sketch is from The Clean & Simple Stamping Blog, Fall to Layout 311. I went very muted on my fall colors. Normally, you would expect Halloween cards to be looking pretty frightful with some fun colors. I thought I would present you with something out of the box today.

Hopefully, within the next week, there's a tutorial that I am absolutely dying to show you which is so perfectly cool for your Christmas cards and definitely for packaging Halloween gifts, so this is one to file away for next year. When I saw this tutorial, it's absolutely brilliant. You will be getting real time since I'm going to have to use iMovie Maker since I still haven't had a chance to take my other laptop in. I really hope that I have all of my video stuff on this Mac somewhere. Video music, at least for me, is hard to find and expensive. I will pull it off somehow so wish me luck.

No real change on the hand yet and it's been 2 months. However, I just started to flex it up maybe 1/2" or so over the past few days. I have a physical therapy order so I think it's time to get serious about that. I can color since my wrist drops anyway so I have learned to use it to my advantage, although I'm positive I'm not doing myself any favors by typing and coloring since I force my hand to stay straight rather than drop unless I'm typing or coloring. I can stay in the lines pretty good but no shading at all. I haven't tried but I know I can't pull it off because you have to use deliberate hand motions that I can't do. I've adapted to this, but still really hate it. I drove my dad's car this weekend and just about screamed when I turned the key to start his car. OMG. You use every single muscle or whatever you have in your hand to do that. It hurt. My thumb is uber sensitive and I'm pretty sure it's the brace so I'm going to ask for a new one at PT like I had with the left hand. A weird thing is that I can't use a regular paper trimmer but can use a guillotine. I also have 2 neurologists who have told me that: (1) You will not gain back the use of your hand, and (2) Maybe 50%. This is unacceptable. I have 2 very severely damaged nerves. I will admit that driving is very difficult. Something good needs to happen to me so pray for that. I had a "Come to Jesus Meeting" and the next morning is when I could first flex my wrist up. It was maybe 1/8", but I knew it was for real and watched it and then a GF confirmed. It does get fatigued easily and eBaying is going to be so hard and do more damage but I have to do it to try to pay for my attorney fees. It won't help if I keep it dropped to type. Bluntly, I'm hosed. My hand is more important but I have attorney fees to pay. I don't make $200,000.00 a year like The Other does. He can replenish. I have to liquidate and will never be able to replenish. I resent it. I resent it all.

So, for today's card, I used all My Favorite Things products. I love their Die-Namics. They are so innovative and their design team shows them well. Amy made some awesome tags that I'm going to make (if I can use the Distress Ink Blender tool (and use as my jumping off point. Her work is fabulous. I love that on their release night, I can get what I want and be done within minutes. I'm having an internal struggle with Papertrey Ink. I've been a longtime groupie but when it takes me hours to pick up a few things, literally hours, because their website is so slow, it's frustrating. By the time you finally get to check out, what you wanted is sold out and that's very uncool. Stampers are rabid over their stuff, but when years of complaints are coming in about making your website more user friendly and taking away ordering conveniences, such as their "I Want It All" feature after a supposedly "new and improved" website with the constant running out of popular products, there's a big problem. It's almost like this intentional frenzy and that is something I resent as a customer. But, they know they have the customer base to do this and I just think it's wrong. With 800 stamp sets and over 400 dies, it's also time to publish a catalog and I was informed a few days ago that they will not do that. No catalog means you really can't use your personal inventory to its fullest potential. Many have put together their own catalog but that's too much of an undertaking for me. I started one while living in Kentucky which I think is on the Windows PC, but it would be so outdated by now. Regardless, it's very frustrating. I did revise this to say that I was in and out of PTI in 4 minutes before 7 pm, so I'm a happy camper! Let's hope next month is the same. Next month also means Valentine's Day and whoever thought of that, I have nothing good to say. At least I won't be telling myself, "Maybe next year," anymore. It will be this year. I even bought The Other a picture for his house and he hasn't said a simple Thank You or even if it arrived yet! RUDE! I'm sure it's still in the box buried in his closet when I should have used that for attorney's fees.

So back to my happy card, I think it's cute, but not cute like others might think since I don't do cute, at all, ever, and never will. The cutest I will do is the My Favorite Things Pure Innocence. I have a couple of Birdie Brown's that need some ink, so we will see how that goes. It's hard to believe that it's mid-October already! We have a solid 4 seasons here in Chico and the leaves haven't started to change yet. We don't get snow, but Paradise does and that's 10 miles up the mountain and available to me if I ever feel the need to see snow. Christmas is nice with snow. It's still in the 80s here and summer to me so I'm still making cards with flowers on them. It's my world. A perfect snow season would be the first snow the Monday after Thanksgiving and then stopping the last day of February. It doesn't work that way in upstate New York where I lived for 15 years between Lakes Erie and Ontario. You get slammed. We went back for Christmas in 2012 and had 3 blizzards in 9 days. I thought we were going to miss our connection since they had to keep de-icing the plane. However, we are experts at the Chicago Sprint.

Okay, so here's really my card made with My Favorite Things products. I did some tone-on-tone stamping too. I'm extremely limited on what I can make, but it's teaching me a lot and is also helping me to just get back to the basics of stamping. It's actually very freeing in the sense that I don't feel the need to load it on. Just good old fashioned stamping. Die-cutting would be impossible if it wasn't for my trusty Vagabond. I did a little thread nest in gold behind my pumpkin too. How fun is that? Believe it or not, that did require some fine motor skills I just don't have right now so making a simple thread nest was challenging. Maybe I will even add a few sequins too. Didn't I just say something above about loading up?

I hope that you enjoy my card and have a very blessed day.

Oh, super important! I am going to start eBaying off some crafty stuff and have more products in my boutique too! The boutique stuff will be kits, especially Halloween kits, this snuck up on me very fast. You can pick yours up on Friday or Saturday and I will have a blog post for you. All you have to do is some minimal assembly and load the bag up with candy! Now let's hope I can find the right size of bag as I'm still unpacking, but it's in one of two places. I will let you know when the eBaying starts. It will be Saturday at the latest. I do tend to group products so you get a good variety in each auction. For example, if a die-cut goes with a stamp set, I will include it in the auction. With ink pads, let's use Ranger as an example, I will sell the entire line of Earth ink pads.With Stampin' Up!, if I sell a retired color, you will get the paper, designer series paper from the 12 x 12 paper pad, marker, ink pad and refill with any coordinating accessories, like the ribbon and buttons, etc.