it's like deja vu, all over again!

i hope you don't mind one last post-christmas "mele kalikimaka" greeting?  it's quite a cheerful one, actually:      

digital supplies:  paper: "your true colors" vera lim designs; brush: travel clusters #1, katie pertiet, designer digitals;  real life supplies:  paper: sei, tim holtz; alphas: k&co, heidi swapp; stickers: recollections, jolees; text stamp: glitz; inks: ranger; pen: uniball; adhesives: tombow monorunner, 3m foam tape, sewing machine

it's also very similar to last week's gift bags. VERY similar, indeed! but i kind of like the way this illustrates my favorite thing about digital supplies:  you can use them over and over!  and not just individually; when you've made a collage like this one (which was the base of my hawaii travel book) for the minimal amount of space it takes up on a flash drive you can not only print it out any number of times, but you can do so at any size... on any type of paper... with or without text. so it's possible to make a book full of journal pages, a brace of holiday gift bags, and a christmas card in three different sessions; and all the serious "design bits" have already been done, you just need to embellish and go! 

this time i added some cool dimensional hibiscus stickers, a little ribbon, some ancient chipboard letters, some less ancient (but decidedly elderly) sparkly pink ones... and got stalled. because the pink blended in too much, whereas the white stood out like an exceptionally painful and obvious sore thumb.*

so i put it aside.  truthfully, i nearly threw it out.  but then it occurred to me that if i considered the thing "ruined" to the extent that i was going to dump it, nothing else i did to it could possibly make it WORSE.  so i decided to just keep going, regardless. i outlined the  pink letters with a gel pen. and then with another, darker one, until they could be seen. i stamped the white ones into submission with a distressy text background. i trimmed down the panel, and made it much inkier around the edges. then i matted the whole kit-n-caboodle onto pink and kraft and BINGO!  it had finally turned into a card i really loved!    

is there a moral to this story?  well, maybe. or maybe not. but the bottom line for me is... yet another version of my favorite creative phrase... "process is more important than outcome!" before i toss a disappointing project, it's pretty much ALWAYS a good idea to stop and at least wonder if perhaps the reason it's not cool yet, is... it's not DONE YET!!!  :)

*it would be really, really excellent to have an illustrative photo, taken at this point in the process, but i didn't think of it.  sorry!  :)