When you are a crafter, you look at everything before you allow it to be thrown into the trash!

I pulled something off a top shelf in our hall closet today, and it caught on some flower-pens I had made some time ago. Anyway, one of them got trashed in the process. But these leaves intrigued me... what could I do with them?

Since I'm "into" flowers right now, it seemed natural to put them all together and this is what resulted. I added the rub-on words outside, as well as inside, saying "Happy Birthday".

There are a couple of cool things I used to create this scrapbook page that I wanted to share with my "crafty" friends. (Bob, you can skip this post.)

The orange and green sheets came from the Canon scrapbook web site. They offer lots of backgrounds, borders, fonts and tags in PDF format for free. Well, OK, you still have to spend your own money for paper and ink, but at least you don't have to pay Canon to get the files. They are all letter size so you have to get creative if you scrap 12x12 pages, as I do.

The other fun thing I did was in getting the Don Quixote in the top corner. First I "stole" an image from an online source (that shall remain namesless) and plugged it into my image editing software, making it the right size to fit the space. My sister-in-law gave me a few sheets of clear, full-page labels. So then I printed it onto one of those sheets and cut it to size. Voi-la! My very own sticker created to my exact specifications. So if you're ever stuck for just the right sticker -- this is one way to get around it.

One day recently I started playing around with a card idea that I might mass-produce and then sell online (eBay or something). I tried this and that. Well, nothing was working out. But this card was the end result, even though I won't be mass-producing it.


As the design was coming together, I realized it would be a wonderful card for our friends (and neighbors) who will be celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary at the end of June.

I was so proud of how it turned out that I just needed to share. So if you check in here from time to time, you'll see other creations of mine -- both cards and scrapbooking.