Happy Happy Mail!

Hello My Krafty Friends!

Happy Wednesday! I have had a very productive week so far. I had President’s Day off and I took a couple of additional days off of work to decompress (aka lounge around in my PJ’s) from work stress and also managed to get my crafting space cleaned up and reorganized which I’ve needed to do since before Christmas. Believe me, it needed some organization badly! I haven’t seen my desktop or side table in months – yes, it was THAT BAD!

At any rate, 3 days of cleaning, organizing and purging and my space is nice and neat and organized and my brain feels much better. It’s truly amazing how stressful a cluttered and disorganized space can make a person. I notice that I actually start to feel resentment and anger when things are messy and then I don’t want to spend time in that space. When I am there all I can focus on is why I can’t find anything, why I don’t have room to work on projects, etc. It becomes stressful. I’m sure some of you can relate. I’ve found that having a space for crafting with everything in it’s place frees up my mind, relieves stress and opens me up to being creative.

I was going to post a couple of pictures of some Valentine’s cards that I made for my husband and my best friend for V-Day, however I received happy mail today and wanted to use this post to share with you.

After searching for a couple of months I finally ordered a “hand made by” stamp to use on my cards. If you are in the market and haven’t searched for them, there are many, many varieties of hand made by stamps out there. Some varieties include the standard wood block, wood block with a handle, plastic, cling mount clear and self inking. I knew I wanted something I could ink myself in various colors. After searching the internet and Ebay I finally turned my sights on Etsy. I found a shop on Etsy that specializes in custom hand made stamps (there were several to choose from). The artist name is Sarah Types. She creates calligraphy type lettered stamps on wood blocks. You can find her shop here: Etsy Shop Sarah Types.  I kept coming back to her design and finally ordered it – note, it was actually my husband’s Valentines present to me because that’s what I told him I wanted. Today’s mail included my stamp. Here’s a picture of it:

The stamp came in a cute little burlap sack with a drawstring and had the hand lettered tag with my name tied to my stamp inside of the bag. What presentation! So cute! I love how well the stamp turned out. I was able to proof the stamp before she finalized it so I knew what it was going to look like. The wood block is actually etched into the wood with the stamp image. The stamp is then mounted to the block on a thick foam base with blue rubber for the image. It stamps beautifully, see below my first stamp:

I’m very excited about being able to use this on my hand made cards.

My other bit of happy mail was a couple of stamps that I’d ordered from The Greeting Farm.

These are two new stamps that were made available to order last week on The Greeting Farm website. The one on the left is SSSC No. 009 – Day Out and the one of the right is SSSC No. 008 Cheeky Sweet. These were made available as part of the Super Secret Stamp Club. For anyone who’s interested The Super Secret Stamp Club registration is coming up in early March. You can find out all the details HERE about how to get cool stamps before anyone else. Who doesn’t love that?!

Looking forward to coloring these cuties up soon. I will be sure to share when they’re complete.

For now, I need to get some home work in for my Copic class as I enjoy the last few hours of my vacation (and my clean craft room) before I head back to work tomorrow.

Thanks for checking out my happy mail with me. Have a wonderfully crafty week!