WORM WISHES

Woo hoo! This is my 300th blog post! 

I cannot believe that I have penned 300 posts since I began my Paper Seedlings blog in September of 2012. I hope that in the course of all these words, projects, photos, I have inspired you in some way.

That was my intent when I began Paper Seedlings; thus the name of the blog. My goal was to help plant some little Paper Seedlings in your brain to help you on your path to serenity and happiness through creativity. As I call it,  Creative Therapy. If I HAVE inspired you in any way, I would love to hear from you. In the future, my intent will remain the same. I want to share what I love with you in hopes of helping you along your road to becoming <more> creative..

My daughter, Emily, tells me constantly that I should not fret about my numbers when I am blogging. That I should be doing it to make myself happy. Blogging for just me is sort of boring and senseless. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, I am blogging for YOU, my readers. It saddens me a bit that I haven't reached as many creatives or those desiring to become more creative. According to my number of followers and pageviews, I have not succeeded in reaching me as many as I had hoped.

If any of you who ARE reading my 300 posts have any suggestions for improving my blog and extending my reach, I would also love to hear from you. Being not terribly technically savvy, some blog improvements are beyond me. I apologize if my blog's appearance isn't as up-to-date and technically beautiful as many are. But, it's just little ol' me. And I truly am doing the best I can.

But, if you have any ideas or suggestions of how I can improve content or anything else that I have control of, well . . . you know. Let me know!

As I've mentioned, my dad had been having some serious health issues these past months. And my mom, his caretaker, frets over him constantly and, because of this, she herself is having some difficult times in feeling overwhelmed.

Since I live more than 100 miles away from Mom and Dad, I don't get the opportunity to see them in person as often as I would wish. So I call Mom every day just to show her my support and love.

Recently I thought I would send her my wishes a little more tangibly. How? Why, a cheery card, of course!

Once again, I turned to the nifty hostess set, Time to Celebrate. But this time I picked on the little worm in the set. Since I see him as more of a caterpillar, I wanted him to be green, so stamped him in black onto Wild Wasabi cardstock. I colored in his stripes with Pacific Point Stampin' Write Markers.

To add a little punch to the otherwise not too exciting image, I stamped the flower he had clutched in his mouth on Whisper White, colored in the center, and cut it out, popping it up with Stampin' Dimensionals. 

The star shapes surrounding the image were cut with the Stars Framelits and raised away from the scholarly caterpillar with Stampin' Dimensionals. I love the look! Do you?

And, what do you think of the dots? I sponged them onto Whisper White cardstock using Wild Wasabi ink and the dot design from the Dots & Stripes Masks (page 205 in the catalog). 

I guess the theme of this card is pop, pop, pop (dimensional!) and cheery happiness. Mom loved it when she received it. Good! It accomplished what I had hoped. 

And, since the card was square, I used my trusty Envelope Punch Board to make a custom envelope to fit it perfectly!

Worm

Smiles.