The Art of the Stamp

The Christmas card travelled to Connecticut in a package filled with gifts for my son and his wife. That card has a long history which began 5 years ago when I decided to start making cards and scrapbooks. To know me is to love me. To love what I draw is to really love me because I can't draw, paint or do anything that doesn't use words to express myself in an artistic way. Until they placed a rubber stamp in front of me and said "just do it". Hands shook, sweat broke out and I wondered, as I sat around a table with 10 other women, what the hell we were doing playing with children's toys. I didn't know a single stamp could cost $15.00 or that all the additional stamping stuff existed in places I had never been, aisles I had never walked. Well, that's over.

After thousands of dollars, I can now call myself a stamper and a scrapbooker. Sounds like something only lonely old ladies would do but I'm here to tell you that isn't the case. It's not my case. I'm not really old and I'm certainly not lonely. Family, 2 dogs, a house and friends keep my phone ringing and my days interrupted, happily. Blogs on cardmaking and scrapbooking must be in the thousands and thousands. I can never keep track of any of them. But none of them tell you the fate that awaits once you pick up that first stamp. It's a sickness. Any stamper will tell you that as you expand your ability through classes, the internet and books, you become a crazed shopper who knows every brick and mortar store within 50 miles, peruses as many blogs and message boards as possible per week and discovers that catalog pusher of stamps and sundries: Stampin' Up! Once you have fallen for SU you are done. Finished. Over. Your credit card warps and turns into a pile of molten plastic. The local, privately owned stamp shop is rare but once discovered is one of the most dangerous places you will ever set foot in. There are stamps, inks, pens, books, papers, ribbons, glues, glitters, tools, embossing powders, embossing folders, and a list of classes to take that will feed your addiction and expand your basement until there is not one more inch of space left to stash even 1 slim piece of 12 X 12 paper. You learn to stamp for a card, use papers to make any manner of books and then you graduate to using giant clothespins to make a standing scrapbook. The mixed media class teaches you that you (the clueless, least artistic person in town) can use paint. That aisle in Michaels that you never bothered to go down because you, the untalented one, don't use paint of any kind? That special place with tubes and containers and brushes and jars was always so mysterious and a little sinister. What kind of odd sort would be into that stuff and what the hell do they do with it? That mixed media class teacher releases a monster that must have acrylics and watercolor crayons (again, why are we using kid's things to make art?), watercolor pencils and gesso and brushes. There are papers and canvases and you actually leave that mixed media class believing that you can create something without the teacher over your shoulder. Sort of. And each month there are new classes and professionals make appearances. Tim Holtz, Jennifer Mcguire, Claudine Helmouth, and many more that will be familiar only to stampers and paper lovers. They bring with them the projects and the lists that will keep you outside of any budget that you put on paper on January 1st. Actually, they will blow your budget so loud and so far that you will be in debt before you even begin to write the damn list on that first day of the year. Busted and beloved. That's how you feel.

It's early morning and my mug is a winter scene with the limbs of the pine trees on it covered with snow. I'll fill it with spiced apple tea and get the day started. What color is your mug this morning?