Thinking outside the box

I have a fairly extensive collection of Magnolia stamps because I’m intrigued by their sweetness and innocence. I don’t, however, have a lot of perches for the sitting stamps. So, I think outside the box. I got out all the handbooks from my Cricut cartridges and tagged the shapes I thought would work. Any of the windows from the fairytale cartridges, packages, trains, autos (think sitting on Speed McQueen), mushrooms, Christmas ornaments, bridges. You can experiment with size (I actually make notations in pencil on my handbook when I get one right) and if you have Cricut Design Studio, you can even alter your die-cuts. Papertrey has a lovely stamp of a spool of sewing thread. I stamped several, colored them and wrapped them with thread. Pile them up and put a sitting magnolia on it; use a “sew thankful” phrase. Wallpaper borders from discontinued books make wonderful backgrounds. Use a kitchen shelf, an outdoor scene, or flower pots. Cut them out, pop-dot them or just use them as your background paper and build up. Some clip-art works very well. If you’re into sports, find a pic of your favorite team’s helmet, logo, baseball bat, basketball, cut it out, color your image to match and place your image on it. Can you see this little girl in Packer colors? How about Winnie the Pooh’s honey pot?

This card has a window from Happily Ever After, page 70, cut at 4 inches, cuttlebugged and inked with a distressing ink. The leaves and branches are a Sizzix die, the flowers are an old punch. This same window would look good with a window box (just cut a shape with scissors, pop-dot it, add flowers behind it and put the image on it. Any tree branch would work for sitting on or for a swing. Cut a rectangle, add thin string from the branch to the back of the rectangle and sit your image on the swing. Go through your stamps, handbooks, and papers with new eyes.