State of the World

I was doing my daily visit of blogs that I love and I came across this one from Ginny Carter. Ginny is the former owner of Stamper's Anonymous and the Creative Block. And a wonderful artist. I always like reading about what she is doing and her point of view as an artist and a person.

She reminisced a bit about where stamping as it is today started, and a bit about where we are now. And, of course, it makes me think about how I started way back when.

I think, for me, it started how it starts for so many. I wanted to make a card. For Mother's Day. And I saw these cool little blocks that I could ink and reproduce the same image over and over. Of course, I could produce the same results with a computer, but after spending 8+ hours at a computer, I wanted to make something with my hands.

So I made that card for my Mother. And one for every Mother I knew.

Then I went to a Stamp Convention where I took a stamping class and I was hooked. The class was a discovery of the art form and breathed a hunger in me that could only be satisfied by stamping. I discovered Somerset Studio magazine and proceeded to purchase every back issue I could find. I memorized the names of the artists featured, as if they were rockstars.

I discovered there were a lot of stampers out there and I spent the hours not working, stamping away and learning how to "distress" things. How to properly sponge the edges of a card so that it looked vintage. I was a stamping, distressing and edging queen. As confused as many of my non-stamping friends and family were confused when they got brown cards and "art" pieces, I loved it. And, I resigned myself to keeping my creations to myself and amassed a huge pile of them that sat diligently under my bed.

Then 9/11 happened. And after the sadness and tragedy of it, I needed something that would pull me out of the constant state of depression I seemed to be in.

That's when my stamping saved me. And here is where I have to go back to Ginny's post about where stamping has gone. Some of us needed to make things that weren't so "heavy"...and "brown". We needed to lighten our hearts. We needed to smile again. We needed to use color in bright swathes across our pieces and return to a simpler way of design. A simpler life.

And that's why The Cat's Pajamas happened. To fulfill that need. Plus, I was running out of room under the bed. And I've had a smile on my face ever since.