Happy New Year!

Today (technically yesterday I suppose), I did the unthinkable.  I went to The Keepsake Element and bought some new paper--it's beautiful.  Now, this isn't the first time that I've bought beautiful paper, but it IS the first time I [GASP] used it so quickly!  Typically, I'm a collector.  I buy paper and then think it isn't worthy of any project I have so it just piles up in my craft room and never gets used.  Well, not in 2008--I made a decision to use my "stuff" more often.  I made two cards tonight and I used my Cricut, my Cuttlebug, my new Nestibilities Dies, my new Scor-Pal AND my new paper.  Yes, I may have overdone it just a little bit.  Like most resolutions, I'm sure this one will fade quickly so I figured I may as well overdo it now to compensate for not doing it all later.  And, yes...this paper was my least favorite of all of the new ones I purchased--baby steps, people!

The card pictured here is a gate-fold card.  I used the set, Time Well Spent which is a Level 3 hostess set in the Spring/Summer Collection.  All SU! demonstrators received this set compliments of Shelli Gardner and SU! at Thanksgiving.  It was a sweet surprise!  I stamped the sentiment in Basic Brown and used my markers and an Aqua Painter to color it in.  A quick and easy card that I will probably have you make sometime soon :-).

If you're interested in seeing this entire collection of papers from American Crafts, you can see them here.  The Keepsake Element didn't have all of these patterns, but they had a decent selection.