Remembering Ben Casey

I remember watching Ben Casey as a child but honestly, I can't remember any single episode to this day.  What does stand out in my mind is the opening of the show.

Dr. Zorba drawing those characters and explaining their meaning, for whatever reason, made a lasting impression on me.  I don't know if it was the artistic part of it or that I've always had a fascination with codes and symbols.  Something made it memorable.

While I was making two cards I needed this week, this kept going through my head because of the events that I was creating the cards for.  

First a birthday (our lovely mail lady at work who loves the color yellow), 

And then a sympathy for a former co-worker who just lost her mother to Alzheimer's.  Her mother was an artist and the co-worker has shared craft supplies with me that her mother no longer used or needed.

Both cards use the same stamp set - Betsy's Blooms, a new SU die set, and a couple of new embossing folders (non-SU) that I've recently obtained.

I wasn't sure about the color combo on the first one, but in daylight it looks prettier than here.  The  flower was stamped in Daffodil Delight and I used a Summer Starfruit marker to give some depth to the petals.  It's not as tedious as you think to add that little bit of oomph.  I also used a marker to highlight the "feathers" on the bird's wing.  

The second card blossom was highlighted in the same way - just a different color combination.  

One of the things that I did during our "storm recovery" was to use some scrap cardstock and make a sample of all of my embossing folders.  I did this for two reasons.  Well, three if you count keeping busy without power.  First, I wanted to have an actual example of the embossing on cardstock to aid me in choosing one when creating.  Also, if you notice in the two cards above (which I have not made samples for yet as I got them after we recovered) although I started with the same size paper, the embossing itself can cause the paper to appear to shrink in size depending on the pattern used.  

The card bases were the exact same size and so were the white panels before embossing, but if you look at the "frame" created from adhering the embossed panel to the base, you will see that it is slightly different.  This doesn't bother me here with these cards, however, if I were doing a different project that I wanted to be more precise, my samples could help me to see which ones might need adjustment in their measurements.  

Gotta run and get some holiday projects finished before HWNSNBP returns from his reffing today.  Hope you have a wonderful weekend!