Why a Garlic Press Is Like The Internet

So I was making soup tonight.

Chicken enchilada soup, to be precise. You know - sort of like they have at Chili's?

Anyway, as I was squashing my garlic, I was amazed at what a great job the garlic press does, for such a simple tool.

How DOES it squish all the good stuff out of the little holes and leave the hull in the squishy part? Why doesn't it get clogged up? Why is garlic the perfect consistency for this miraculous little gadget?

I know Alton Brown would not approve of my use of a garlic press, and normally, I completely agree with him - I am not a fan of kitchen gadgets and appliances and do most everything with a sharp knife and a saucepan. But the garlic press, well, that's a unitasker that even I can love. Forgive me, Alton, for I have sinned. It's been less than a day since my last unitasker.

I was thinking about all the things the garlic press has in common with the internet. Gmail is a garlic press - squishing all my email into my box and holding on to the Russian and Chinese spam telling me how interesting my blog is, and how, because of this, I must be riveted by the prospect of making $3000 a week taking online surveys. It's quite good at this, actually. Google search is equally good at squishing out unnecessary trash and leaving me with what I want.

In the stamping world, challenges are a garlic press of sorts. Especially Virtual Stamp Night, where there's a time limit and I have to cut to the chase of designing.

But all challenges do the same thing for me. They peel away all my normal stampy bad habits and leave just a set of simple design rules. I think they always make my designs better, cleaner, less  over thought.

I saw today's technique challenge late last night, and just before I fell asleep I knew what I wanted to try.

The challenge is to use one color of ink, and no coloring. I love to color, so it really was a challenge. But right before the sandman came, I thought maybe what a monochromatic image needed was a really dramatic frame. So here's what I did.

Punchy, eh?

As far as I'm concerned, Poppy Parade is the BLUE of reds. It's perfection. So I used the middle two labels framelits - the smaller one to cut half a label in Crumb Cake cardstock, and both to cut a Poppy Parade frame to go around it. I glued the frame to the Crumb Cake, and then glued that to a white card base and stamped the greeting from Afterthoughts (hostess  set) in Poppy Parade.

That greeting cracks me up.

I think a good half or more of us go to birthdays AND weddings for the cake! :)

I distinctly remember the cake euphoria that set in each time I received a birthday party invitation as a child - do you?

If you squished all the extras out of a birthday party, I think what you'd have left is a nice, fluffy piece of cake. :)

Loveyameanitbye.