Hello again, my crafty friends!
OK, so I've been crazy-super-busy the past few weeks and oddly hinting that I would share the
why with you. Last week was National Medical Laboratory Professionals Week and as an admin, I'm on the Committee that plans and puts together all the celebrations. This year I had stepped down my commitments and was "only" assigned a few pre-Week tasks. These included both a Tshirt sale and... candygrams.
I suppose I have only myself to blame as several years ago I suggested it as a way to improve morale, get more people interested, and create a way to sort of "advertise" our week elsewhere in the hospital. Our Lab employees buy a card that they fill out on one side with the name and mailcode of the recipient, who may be anywhere in our health system, and the other side with a little message. Then a group of us get together and prep little white paper sacks of candy, fold em up, staple on the cards and mail out at the beginning of Lab Week. The most we'd ever done was about 800 altogether... mostly chocolates, but some hard/chewy candies and we even offer sugar free chocolates and sugar free non-chocolate candies for the diabetics among us.
This year.... this year we topped out at a jaw-dropping 1760! There was a BIG jump in the number of candygrams sent out to non-lab departments. I am soooooo lucky that this year I actually had a handful of volunteers because some years it has been just me, or me and one other person with her two kids. This year I had two adults and five kids (kids make great candybag filling slaves! LOL) most of the day and a few hours each from three other adults. Also fortunately it's very organized and well-thought out assembly line style which really keeps the pace up. We did 1400 in 8 hours and I did another 300 the next day and 60 more latecomers early in the week. None of them had ever helped before and one told me that she if never sees another little white bag full of candy again it will be too soon. LOL If I can get a picture one of them took of the tables full of little white paper sacks standing at attention and being filled up with sweets, I'll share it... but what I can share with you is my photo of how much candy I bought on my first run to the store.
This is what $1000 worth of candy looks like:
And yes, I got many, many, many weird looks while shopping. Usually people selling candy buy the full bars and people assume they're at a stand or filling vending machines. But bags and bags and bags of miniatures really had them guessing. I had to make another trip to pick up sugar free items and more chocolates as we sold probably close to 1500 of those. So, with making flyers, candy shopping excursions, printing candygram cards, the TShirt sale, assisting with planning the educational lectures and helping with some other prep work, I was lucky to be home to let the dogs out to pee on a regular basis, poor pups.
Anyway, I am now free from Lab Week responsibilities and ready to get back to my normal crafty creativity. This week I got to spend some time coloring!
Send A Smile 4 Kids has a great challenge up today.... buttons and ribbons and/or bows! I jumped on the "and/or" because I just don't seem to leave room in my imagination quite yet for bows when I'm thinking through my design... or I never have just the right ribbon I would want to use.
Our sponsors this week have generously granted us some great prizes for THREE randomly chosen winners:
There's something about the angles in so many of her drawings that made me pick A Day for Daisies as the focus of my card for the challenge. I chose the image
Puppy Love.
Although I am no
Delphine or
Coops, I have been practicing my coloring, although not as much as I'd like, and played a bit more with texture and light sources, which are two of the things I admire most about these very different card artists. I particularly worked on getting the sort of mottled look of some of the acid-washed, beat to death denims we have these days, but without any rips or tears. And I decided on a stronger light source this time and from a definite direction. If this little charmer's blond hair doesn't point you the right direction of my light source, I really failed. LOL I also see now why some Copics coloring champions also use pencils to deepen the darkest edges. Getting what should be dark crevices the right color is going to take (much) more practice, but I'm happy with what I've learned so far. One thing I'm not happy with is the errant gray mark on his ear that I had to kind of color over and blend in... I have some depth perception issues and I have to be more careful about how far away from the paper my pen tip is or "oops!" happens a lot. LOL
The papers are DCWV The Pet Stack. I love the bits of blue in all the earthy colors in this stack. I wish that DCWV did more smaller papers and brought the pattern down to scale. I used Walnut Distress Ink on all my edges. The buttons and the twine are from the candy stash that I won from
Michelle O last year. I haven't really buttoned up much, but she sent a whole bunch of vintage buttons and I love the look with the colors of the DCWV papers. My ribbons are a mesh wired ribbon layered with a brown sheer, both from Berwick-Offray. A little puppy button from Jesse James adorns my sentiment and a few teeny pearls finish my other corners. My image is ... (you know what's coming) popped up on foam dots. I did use a stylus to just slightly round out my image a bit around the edges too.
My teamies have beribboned, buttoned and bowed up some fabulously gorgeous cards... head on over to
Send A Smile 4 Kids Challenge to oooh and aaaah over them, then get to crafting and share your kid-friendly cards with us for a chance at those super prizes. Even better, follow the guidelines
here and make a couple to send some cheer to a girl or boy of any age who's stuck in hospital on these gorgeous spring days! (And even if it's raining and the world is waterlogged, who wants to be stuck indoors at a hospital?)
Thanks for hanging in for this VLP (very looooong post) and have a crafty week! I will see you all soon!
Christy
The red swirl paper has been in my stash a very long time, maybe even as long as decade. Scary. I'm not even sure what I originally planned to do with it, but I thought it was pretty and I loved it. LOL Sad when you have a paper addiction before you ever become a card crafter. =) The blue sky background paper is a new purchase from Nitwit Collections, part of the At the Park set. Love! It was perfect for my Pink Cat Studio digi squirrel and his heart-full branch. The sun is also from PCS... a freebie sentiment stamp, but I masked off the sentiment before I printed it. 
