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After a really fun trip to see my new grandson in Idaho, I am home and trying to catch up from where I left off. One of those things was to post my remaining 5 tips to help you love your clear-mount stamps! (See my initial 5 tips here.) So here are those next 5 tips:
Don't use Stazon Cleaner on your clear-mount stamps...... or at least not while they're still mounted to the block. The Stazon Cleaner can cause damage to the acrylic block.
Trying to decide which blocks to order? I recommend beginning your block collection by purchasing the entire bundle of 9 blocks (item #118491). This will give you one each of any block size you may need - while saving more than 10% of the cost of acquiring them individually. But if you tend to work with a lot of stamps going at the same time (like I do), then you may eventually want to add another of each of the 4 smaller sizes, too.
Have you noticed the thumbnail images on the spines of your clear-mount storage cases? This clever and useful feature will help you keep track of the images you have in your collection - whether you stack or stand the cases on a shelf, or line them up in a deep drawer.
Your Stampin' Up!® clear-mount stamps arrive die cut, as do today's wood-mount stamps. While this is just fine for the majority of stampers, if you happen to be fussy like I am, you may prefer to trim them closer yet. If so, be sure to do your trimming AFTER you've applied the labels - being careful not to undercut the supporting foam. The foam layer must remain the same size - if not larger than - the rubber layer.
Don't leave your clear-mount stamps on their blocks for long, long periods of time. I once left a stamp on its block for a couple of weeks, and when I was ready to remove it, the label came right off the stamp and stayed on the block! Talk about "cling" power, lol!
If you still have any remaining questions about Stampin' Up!'s Clear-Mount stamps, please click the comment link (below), and just ask!
Today I thought I'd share some tips for using your new Stampin' Up!® Clear Mount Stamps:
Press the stamp firmly onto the acrylic block for a few moments to give the cling backing a chance to adhere. (Remember the stamp has a "cling" surface, NOT "adhesive", so you must press it into place.) Also, do the same when you return the stamps to their storage container so they'll adhere to the inner surface of the case and not tumble all over inside - or worse yet, fly out at you when you open it!
When you clean these stamps on your Stampin' Scrub, be careful not to over-saturate the pad with Stampin' Mist. If you work up a foam, it may interfere with the cling properties.
Take it easy with the "scrubbing" action. If you've developed a strong-arm scrubbing technique over time with your wood-mount stamps, remember this temporary cling will require developing a more gentle habit; intense scrubbing will pop the stamp right off the block! And for those really tiny stamps that will hardly tolerate ANY scrubbing, it's probably just easier to remove them from the block altogether before cleaning 'em.
Grease from your fingers, or dust, glitter, or pet hair may eventually interfere with the clingability of these stamps. But a quick gentle bath with some dishwashing liquid (such as Dawn®), followed by a good rinse and drying with a lint-free towel should fix that right up.
Your Clear Mount stamps come ready to mount and use as soon as you punch them out from the rubber sheet and pull off the protective tab from the back. But most people like to add their optional labels, too. If you choose to put the included optional labels on your Clear Mount stamps don't handle the label with your fingers as you apply it. Instead, remove the protective cover from the label, but leave the label itself ON THE LABEL SHEET. Then after you've removed the protective cover from the back of the stamp, lay the stamp down onto the label, matching the shape of the stamp to the outer shape of the label. (Additional tip: if you have trouble getting the protective cover off the label while it's still on the sheet, carefully work the tip of your Paper Snips into the slit in the middle of the protective cover, then make a little snip to the edge of one end of that slit. This will make it easier to grab 'hold of that protective cover to remove it.)
Just got the final results of Stampin' Up!®'s campaign to generate funds for the Red Cross to support the Haiti earthquake relief efforts. In total during the run of the campaign, you and stampers around the world purchased over 13,500 "I {Heart} Hearts" stamp sets - generating over $27,000 in donated funds.
Thank you to all who participated by purchasing that stamp set! (And thank you to Stampin' Up! for donating the money from each set purchased.!)
Woo Hoo!!! I'm excited to share that our 1-1/2" x 2" Simply Adorned charm becomes available for ordering today!
This means that now ALL the Simply Adorned products can be ordered. Here's a pricelist, or........
....... view the entire Simply Adorned line at my online store. To get there, visit http://StamptheRock.StampinUp.net . From my home page, click the SHOP NOW button and then enter "Simply Adorned" in the search box.
What will you do with YOUR Simply Adorned charms and chains? Do you have a unique, creative idea? Share your ideas in the comments section below!
That was the familiar confident sound of the brass knocker at my front door announcing Steffi's arrival....... canvas tote bag in hand. Inside that bag were always a floral-print chair cushion, several pairs of scissors, adhesives, some scraps of ribbon, and various other crafting supplies. As she carefully claimed and arranged her place at the table, she always had a story to share with us about something intriguing - a new restaurant that had opened, a talk she was giving in Seattle, or maybe just a rare deer that had wandered through their property recently. But whatever her news, it was always delivered with that unique, charming, spunky flair that I just have to call "SO Steffi".
Once she was settled, stamping class could begin.
And so it went - for the past dozen years. Through monthly Stamp-a-Stack gatherings & Stampers 30 Club meetings, annual Christmas Card classes, Stamp Camps and classes that featured more complex projects, and even a one-time-only opportunity to take a trip into Seattle with a dozen of us excited, enthusiastic stampers for a full-day seminar last spring.... year after year, Steffi charmed her stamping friends with her SO-Steffi style. In spite of advancing arthritis in her hands and a myriad of other health challenges, she continued to persevere with her stamping and papercrafting - even though it often meant she had to turn certain delicate details over to me to finish for her. It was always a privilege to help her, and I count myself the most fortunate of all of us to have been here for every one of those memorable events.
There will not only be a very empty chair, but an empty place in our hearts when we gather 'round the stamping table again next week; Steffi left not only us, but her adoring husband Rick, and countless numbers of other friends and fans far and wide last Monday.
As I've chatted with the friends in our stamping circle as well as our neighbors here locally this week, I've noticed the same words keep coming up in our conversations: charming, spunky, adorable, endearing, fascinating..... and I just smile and nod my head. Yep, all those and more. She certainly was.
A peculiar thing about many stampers is that we often like to stamp cards, but then we sometimes have a hard time giving them away. But not Steffi. She was a prolific card "sender" as well. She would often make upwards of 8 - 10 cards at a time here at our monthly stamping sessions, and I'm fairly confident she did indeed send out nearly every one. As the holiday season approached she made both Hanukkah cards and Christmas cards - and sent to each friend accordingly. And every year I had the privilege of helping her make several (often somewhat complex) custom gifts for special people in her life. One such special person was Rick - and he told me she had given him this Valentines mailbox right before she was hospitalized. When I visited at their home, I smiled to see it attractively displayed in their kitchen - chocolates tumbling out just like I'd envisioned.
Late last year Steffi's sister Nina came up from the Los Angeles area to visit. Steffi was anxious to bring Nina over to say hi and show her some of the cards and recent class projects that I always have on display around here. While we chatted, Nina spotted a certain card design that she particularly liked, and she announced to Steffi that she wanted a set of those cards for her birthday. So as soon as Nina's visit was over, Steffi ordered the necessary supplies, and then early this month she and I met so that I could give her some pointers on how to recreate that particular card design. (Well, a version that was similar, although not an exact copy.) She had decided to make 4 of those cards, and when she returned for Stamp Club a week later (Tuesday, Feb. 9th) she proudly displayed those 4 beautiful completed cards, explaining to the ladies at the table that they were to be her sister's birthday gift because Nina had special-ordered them. I can still see Steffi's happy smile as she passed those cards around and everyone admired them - and we could tell she'd worked meticulously to make that special gift for her sister.
Five days later Steffi was in the hospital. As the days crawled by and her condition grew more grave, I felt the need to ask Rick when Nina's birthday was. I'm sure that probably seemed an odd question to be asked at the time, but I figured he would likely not know of the existence of those special cards,and I felt compelled to make sure that Nina would receive her birthday gift from her sister. Well, Rick checked his records and announced the date, which turned out to be later in the spring. "Oh good", I remember thinking, "there'll be plenty of time to hunt down and send those cards later."
Well. Turns out I needn't have worried myself about those cards - because according to Nina, by the time I started asking around she'd already received them in the mail - more than 2 months in advance of her birthday! Ever the orchestrator, SO-Steffi strikes again!
I only knew Steffi the last dozen years of her life - after she and Rick had moved to Whidbey Island from Southern California. But those of us around the stamping table certainly enjoyed her fascinating stories of her younger years - in a time and place that seems such a contrast to the context in which we knew her. You can read about her colorful Hollywood years in recent pieces in the Los Angeles Times (here and here), and also in a post by local blogger, Sue Frause. I just had to share about the Steffi *I* knew and admired.
We'll be gathering around the same stamping table again next week. And there'll be an empty chair with a hard wooden seat. Steffi won't need her cushion this time, but I'm sure she'll be there with us. I'll watch for familiar ink smudges.
Woo Hoo!! It only took 3 days, but I think I've finally got Stamp-the-Rock's Facebook posts to stream here, too! I untimately decided to switch to Firefox from Internet Explorer, and suddenly the exact same process I'd been doing for several days without success - suddenly worked! Coincidence? Hmmm.....
Anyway, at least for the time being, you'll find entries from Stamp-the-Rock's Facebook wall streaming here in my left-hand column (scroll down to get there), and if you're not already a fan of Stamp-the-Rock on Facebook, please consider becoming one so you can let me know what's on your mind!
And please bear with me as I figure out this Facebook stuff; this newbie's still tip-toeing around very gingerly, lol!
Did you know you can still order some of the goodies you loved from the 2009 Holiday Mini Catalog? If you've been prowling around my online store you may have noticed them interspersed in there, but until recently there hasn't been a compiled and published *list* of what's still available.
But now we've got an official list. No pictures incorporated into it though, but you can click the links individually. Or, better yet, get out your Holiday Mini and indicate on each page which items are still active - and then "unretire" that Holiday Mini and keep it with your other current catalogs.
So today I'm taking another direction in my post. While it's not directly related to stamping, and I have no stamped project to discuss, it's still definitely related to "what I do", and if you're reading this post I presume you're using a computer, and therefore this topic may pertain to you, too. So here goes.....
Have you ever experienced that sinking feeling of doom that sweeps over you right at that moment when your computer starts spitting out gibberish - or locks up altogether and refuses to boot up? And you just KNOW in an instant that potentially hundreds of your precious photos, your contacts list, and perhaps years' worth of tax files and other important documents and files are probably just about to go bye-bye?
Well *I've* been there. And having experienced that dreadful moment of desperation I know that I never, ever want to have to experience it again!
Oh yes. Having had one of the earliest PC's to find their way into people's homes (btw, did you know I began telecommuting as a programmer for a well-known company way back in 1983 after my son was born?) I, of all people, have known for literally decades that owning a hard drive means it's not a question of IF your hard drive will crash someday - but rather, "when?" And during those same years I've at various times gone through the laborious task of backing up all my data - first to floppies, and then when the backups took hours and hours and over 100 floppies that needed to be inserted sequentially, I graduated to CD's, and then when it took a half-dozen or more CD's to complete an entire backup I ultimately switched to a series of external hard drives.
But in spite of my efforts to be "good" and keep up with the chore, it seemed time and technology too often stood in my way - and when the absolute worst eventually happened one morning, wouldn't you know my back-up was not only very outdated, but most of it proved unreadable, too. Thank GOODNESS I hadn't made a complete switch to digital photography yet, so most of my losses were contained to business files, and not personal pictures. Probably my biggest fear at the time was for the 3 years' worth of tax data files that were on that drive, but thankfully I found someone who was able to pull them off for me. (For a hefty price, of course..... and massive amounts of worry in the meantime that THAT would be the time I'd get audited by the IRS.)
And so in that year I set about to redesign and rewrite from scratch all my business files, determined that that same thing would never happen to me again. Little did I know that the new replacement computer would last less than a year before it, too, would suffer a serious problem that required reinstalling Windows, a ton of money paid to yet another guru, and a full weeks' worth of pulling files off to CD's in order to preserve them yet again.
And so it was that a few years ago when I stumbled upon Carbonite's Online Backup service I was READY for it! And honestly, astonished that this "just set it and forget it" system would automatically make sure that my files were backed up at all times - without my even having to think about them.
Now, given my difficult and unfortunate experiences with backup software and hardware in the past, I was plenty leary of something that only cost (at the time) just under $50 a year..... and claimed to accept an unlimited amount of data for storage online. I couldn't quite grasp how that all would work, but I was curious enough to accept their offer of a free trial, figuring I could just let the trial expire like I end up doing with 3/4 of the "free trials" I accept in the software realm.
But this "free trial" was different! I was SO impressed that less than an hour after I installed it, I went back the website and bought a one-year subscription. And I've renewed every year since - including today.
Over the years I have had at least 3 times I can recall where Carbonite has saved my you-know-what. One of those times would have been another complete disaster had I not had Carbonite, and the other couple of times would have just been major headaches. But each time my computer's decided to burp I've been able to go to the Carbonite site and recover the files I've needed with only a couple of clicks - including the time I had to reinstall the entire hard drive's-worth of files.
So do YOU have efficient, reliable, and current (off-site) backups of your data? If so, congratulations!
But if not, I encourage you to take a look at Carbonite. While it's gone up $5 a year since I first started using it (now at $54.95), they've added remote access as an additional included service. (Remote access means you can access any of your files from another computer should you ever need to.) But it's still free to give it a try. And I think $54.95 a year is mighty cheap insurance anyway. I'm a confirmed fan!
PS: I expect that I'll probably be upgrading to a new computer within a year or so - and it should be pretty easy to download my files to the new computer and have them return to their same locations where I'm accustomed to finding them. I'm looking forward to my easiest transition ever.
Would you be sick if you lost the pictures or files on your computer? Then take a look at Carbonite; it has saved MY you-know-what SEVERAL times in the past year or so!
How fun is THIS?!? Personalized M & M's for any occasion!
