Jingle Belles 43 (and 42)

Gently falling - softly falling

The silence of the snow

Softly falling - gently falling

The warmth we want to know

Gently falling - softly falling

The flakes fall from the skies

Softly falling - gently falling

It's magic to our eyes.

lmastalski 10.26.11

Our Jingle Belles theme this week is "Softly Falling Snow" brough to us by our guest hostess Noelle McAdams of paper & ICE.  Do you want to guess why her name could possibly be Noelle?  I'll let you think about that. 

We are to use something soft on our cards this week.  Could be felt, fabric, flocking, fibers, or, in this case - dryer lint.  Yes, you read it right.  Dryer lint.  (This would have been a good Thursday's Throwaways post if I were still inclined to do them!)

Here's the deal - I bought a couple of new beach towels at Costco this summer and, of course, I washed them before we used them - alone as it were, because you know how new towels can sometimes wreak havoc on old towels with the fuzz that they produce.  Well, in this case, when I went to clean out the lint screen from the dryer this is what I found and I, being the packrat creative person that I am, could not bear to throw it away.  It would have a purpose sometime in the next millenia, even if it were only an offering to the birds for nesting material in the spring.  Isn't it the prettiest shade of blue?

Oh, and that's not all I saved.  I saved the tags that were on the towels because they had a picture of the towel that I thought I could do something with....... someday.

So what does one do with dryer lint?  Believe me, there are more people out there that use this as a medium for their artwork - just google dryer lint art and you'll get a glimpse.

I thought that I'd like to try using the lint in the Big Shot with a flower die.  I wondered if it would hold together after it was die cut, and surprisingly it did as the process of making the die cut actually compressed the lint so that it almost has the appearance of a very thin felt.

I used the Birds and Blossoms die to make the flower.  The leaves and center of the flower were created with DMC Memory Thread.  The picture of the towel was used to make something else that in real life would be soft - a hat and a scarf.  (I hope you can tell that that's what you see as HWNSNBP did not get it.  His first guess was an igloo and he was not joking!)

The snowflakes on the Island Indigo card base were stamped in VersaMark ink and embossed with white EP using the SU set Northern Hearts.  The sentiment comes from The More the Merrier.  The hat is popped up and the scarf is only glued down where the scarf would be folded.  If nothing else, I certainly do like the colors of this.  Will the flower hold up?  Time will tell, but I certainly would not use something like that on a real hat! 

Before I go to check out the other "soft" creations, let me give you a glimpse of the card that I did make for last week's challenge - to be inspired by a holiday song.   I was really not in the mood for card-making so much last week as I was working on addressing the envelopes for my son and future daughter-in-law's Save The Dates, and as it was, I finished my card about five minutes to 6 last Wednesday, but by the time I got the picture loaded on the computer the clock read 6:01 and the link was closed - sigh! 

But what I managed to put together in about 20 minutes that night was this, uh, disaster.   

I found that JOY image already stamped and colored with Twinkling H2O's in some paperwork that I had been cleaning out earlier in the week and put it aside for this.  What I was going to do with it I couldn't remember, but when the clock is ticking (and I do have a ticking clock on my work table) you just start grabbing things.  I looked around and found a piece of copied sheet music, some sparkly ribbons, a little emerald green crepe paper and  here you have it.  Will I sent this out?  Don't know that I will or won't but it will go into the box just the same.  (Yeah, there should be a World on there someplace to fit in with the theme - maybe in the future.....)