1/7th of The Deadly Sins

I saw something on Splitcoast the other day that has been rolling around in my head (the rock tumbler, as I call it.)

A friend posted that one time she had spent a lot of time on a beautiful handmade gift for someone, given it to them, and their response to this gift was the dreaded phrase all of us arty types have heard at least once:

"Some people have too much time on their hands."

Everyone who has ever said this deserves a smack, in my opinion. A firm, well placed smack. Perhaps an eye poke as well.

It really hurt her feelings, which makes me sad. My response to her was this, after observing this behavior for many decades.

What people are REALLY saying when they say this is actually:  

"I feel an immense amount of envy that you manage to do all the fun things you do in addition work/home/kids/yard etc. - I'm not as organized as you are and/or I don't have a fulfilling hobby that I look forward to immersing myself in every spare moment I have, and I should probably go to church now because envy is a sin."


And in reality, it's a lie. People who spend every spare moment in hobbies they love are the ones with NO time on their hands. The people with time on their hands are the ones not making/doing/seeing things in every waking moment.

We all have the same amount of time. And we all decide what to do with it. And if any portion of that time is spent being envious of other people's choices, then hopefully a smack or a visit to church will set that person on the right track. Perhaps there's a church somewhere that smacks people, which would really bring it all together. Maybe I'll start the Holy Order of the Smack. Or Our Lady of the Eye Poke. Now accepting applications for smackers and pokers.

So instead of folding laundry or doing any number of other things I COULD be doing on this rainy Sunday, I chose to make a card for the Challenge Chicks April challenge which is an I miss you card.

At work, we use heat maps to look at what people are clicking on on the website so that we can make the content more relevant and make the site easier to use.

The heat maps are beautiful little informational rainbows and I love them. Here's what one looks like - the red or "hot" areas are the ones people click the most:

 So, so pretty.

So I thought I'd turn that into a card. A bright, happy card to combat the grey outside.

Step one was to use washi tape to mask off all the vases from Vivid Vases except the middle one.

Then I inked that one up in black and carefully removed the tape and stamped it.

Hard to see here, but the colored vases are actually cut out and glued onto the card. I inked the edges of them with a black marker after cutting them out so that no white showed.

Then I used a marker to ink up the greeting from Just Sayin so that I didn't get the talk bubble around it and I stamped that under the vases, which are colored very quickly with dry Derwent Inktense pencils.

Love all that color.

So now I'm off to use my time however the heck I want to. I hope you are too.

Loveyameanitbye.