Happy Birthday Card

I have a fun birthday card to share with you which is also on the Hampton Art blog today.
I stamped the fish and balloon images with a Clearsnap Archival Dye (Wicked Black) ink pad and colored them with Copic markers. I framed the fish with a black diecut frame done with my Sizzix eClips. Add some googley eys, baker's twine and rhinestones and you have a fairly fast and easy birthday card. :)

I have not been blogging much lately and I apologize but somehow January forgot the memo to "slow down." :) I'm hoping February will be better but I started it off with a hard job. I decided to purge, clean and reorganize my craft room. What I thought would be a two or three day job has turned into eight days (with another two to go). :) When my craft room gets so messy and piled I can't stand it any longer (which is usually every 2 1/2 years), I get to work on it. It is a job I always dread but when it is done I'm happier and more productive. :) Before I started, I looked at craft rooms trying to get organization ideas. One problem I've had is keeping my ink pads where I could find colors easily. (I have a lot of Clearsnap ink pads!) I read where you could use vintage Napa Valley cassette holders to organize your ink pads. I found a couple on Ebay and one of them came in today. (I got one which has 100 slots and one that has 64 (because of a space issue). I've been using a basket where pads were stacked on top of each other. This meant hunting and searching for a color and it took way too much time. I'm already in love with my new "old" ink pad holder. How did I live without it? :)Another thing I did to save space plus make work easier was to remove my Sizzix eClips design cartridges from their plastic cases. I have all of them in a single plastic organizer (one of those with 21 slots...like you store brads, etc.) I've placed it next to my eClips so no more hunting for a cartridge. It also opened up nearly a whole shelf in one my storage units. :) I did a little shopping this weekend and found some wonderful tapered totes and leather organizers at Lowe's on clearence for 1/2 off. Major score there! :) My work desktop computer moniter bit the dust last week so I decided to take my little flat screen tv in my craft room and turn it into a moniter. I splurged and ordered a 32 inch "smart" TV for the craft room and it came in today too. Don't have it out of the box yet but pretty excited about getting it set up. I left a whole shelf empty just for it! Wink! :) And famous last words....I'm not going to let my craft room get messy again (said the last two times I redid it)....but this time I mean it. :)