My maiden post!

Welcome to my blog.

Here it is... my maiden post. Such pressure!

Even though I have not two but three other blogs they are all dedicated to the company. I realized I'd still like to be able to show off my personal projects, which sometimes feature companies outside of my own, so I figured I should set myself up a personal blog.

Since this is my first post on my brand spanking new blog I figured Id tell you why I named this blog Stamp-O-Matic. It all started about 11 years ago when I was a die hard scrapbooker. Did you ever notice that alot of us scrapbookers and stampers refer to ourselves as OCD? Well Im pretty familiar with the affliction. Its a running joke in my family, my compulsion to collect every color paper, sticker, embellishment, pen, ink pad and other gizmo associated with my hobbies and my sister surveying my every increasing collection nicknamed me Scrap-O-Matic. For the past 11 years that has even been one of my email addresses and I think its only natural to carry it over into my stamping, as stamping has taken over such a big chunk of my life.

As I said I started out as a scrapbooker...and to this day I still do not understand how not every stamper scrapbooks and how not every scrapbooker stamps. It makes no sense to me. They are logically intertwined. The beauty of scrapbooking is that you get to KEEP a large portion of the projects that you make. Where as with stamping, most of it is given away. In stamping the projects are generally start to finish in a couple of hours, instant gratification. In scrapbooking you are making something infinitely more significant to your family, friends and your own personal history, but you use so many of the same products with both hobbies. Stamping enables a scrapbooker to use a non consumable product (stamps) to create a uniformed look in your albums with the use of alphabet stamps, pattern stamps and well.. any stamps. You get alot of mileage out of your stamps when you scrapbook. Scrapbooking generates a ton of scraps that would most certainly be put to good use on a card.
Consider making a photo card one of these days and merging the hobbies! Humm... is that a new future challenge?

As I said before, I started out a scrapbooker. Scrapbooking lead me to rubber stamping and I became a demonstrator for one of the direct sales companies. At the same time I also had pet chinchillas. We had been breeding them and got very involved in breeding mutation colors for pets. At one time we had chinchilla couples in colors chinchillas Grey (the color most fur coats are), beige, white, black, chocolate, spotted, silver, and violet. I being a stamper naturally I wanted chinchilla rubber stamps. There were none. So I looked into making my own stamps, (http://www.chinstamps.chinchillas.org/) the company was born (http://www.starvingartistamps.com/) and so was a new nickname... StampOMatic.

Speaking of challenges I think I will break in my first post on my new blog with my first challenge card. The challenge is Swedish Collage Style. (more details about the challenge on the company blog http://www.starvingartistampsgallery.blogspot.com/) Here is my first attempt. I really thought this was going to be an easy challenge. Several of us have had the same reaction to our first challenge cards. Those Swedish girls make them look a whole lot easier than they are!

Originally this card didn't have spiders and webs. It had a chipboard "BOO" on the top right. But it seems a few of us had the "boo" inspiration and I figured Id trade in the boo for the spiders and then I added the stitching. I told myself I really need to stop overworking this card and thats where I stopped.



Here are a couple of close ups:


This is not going to be my final attempt at the Swedish Collage Style. Im considering this my "warm up" card.