Necessity is the Mother of Creativity

Two of my clients just bought a new home.  They are particular favorites of mine, having been with me almost the entire time I've been at the salon where I work.  They are fun, hip, smart, great parents, and we always have a great time when I do their hair. Anyhoo...

 I wanted to congratulate them on their new home, and I find there isn't too much out there by way of sentiments that express that sort of thing (or at least not at my local craft stores).  I probably could've done a big search and found something online, but they were moving the very next day, and I thought, "wouldn't it be nice to get some real snail mail in your brand-new place?"  I like to jump on these sorts of things, mostly because my memory can be a bit shoddy these days, so I started digging through my supplies.

So, I made them this--

Please forgive the grainy photo.  I snapped this with my phone just before I mailed it....

I found a Christmas set that I could work with.  This is Stampendous' Holiday Home set, which I like because of the picket fence, which just says "home" to me. I stamped everything with Memento Tuxedo black ink, and used markers to color the house just a bit.  I attached the house and fence piece to the grass bit, and the popped it all off the surface with some foam squares.  The trees behind the fence were stamped right onto the cloud paper with Versacolor Split Pea.  The sentiment is from Stampendous' Everything Happy set, which I really like because it stamps really clearly, and is so cute and tiny. 

I used GinaKDesigns Pure Luxury 120#  white paper as the base and layered it with black and white stock from The Paper Co.  This is my value cardstock; not so fancy, but good for layering.

I used two papers from DCWV The StackIII, the sky and grass image papers.  I can't find anything similar to these papers anywhere, and I will be so sad when I run out of them.  I will have an "issue" with buying another StackIII just to get those papers, let me tell you!!

The inside was a bit tougher to come up with.  I did this--

Again, please forgive the lousy photo.  I really have to leave my camera nearby, so I won't be tempted to use my phone so much.  I really wanted to mail this one quickly!

Because I had no "new home" sentiment to play with, I got inventive.  I have these letter stamps that I bought at TARGET for $1.00.  I figured that this was a cutesy enough stamp set that I could go a little crazy, so I stamped the word NEW all askew like that in SU Ruby Red ink and hand drew the little bracket that tries to stuff the whole word into the sentiment.  I backed it all with some black and a tiny piece of my grass paper to tie it into the front, and there you go.  Oh yeah, those exclamation points are done by hand too.  Why not, right?

So, this was rather easy to accomplish, once I figured out where to go with it.  Stuffing words into sentiments probably wouldn't work with a more formal card, I know, but I think here it's rather fun.  And it sure doesn't look like something you bought at the drugstore!

I haven't seen them since they moved yet.  I hope they liked it, and that the move and settling in all went smoothly.

Thanks for dropping by! 

All Best-
Richard