It's been a a year of changes in my life. My oldest son graduated from high school (yes, I'm old!) and then decided to defer college a year (which was a wise decision) but actually thought he'd hang out in our home playing video games - not! I began working full-time but in an interim situation to gain experience. (I graduated with a degree in accounting a little over a year ago). I'm now looking for just the right job to begin my second career (or my third career if I count my years as mom). My youngest left the large public high school to do cyber school from home, which was a necessary but not an easy transition. It's been busy.
I only did about half the card posts in 2015 that I did in 2014. That's a little sad, but it also kept cardmaking as my escape - not my job. I kept the design team positions that I most loved. I was first on board with the Curtain Call team and continue with that. I love being part of Freshly Made Sketches - it's the nicest, most caring, and friendliest team around - not to mention great sketches. My "company" team is Taylored Expressions - their product is such a good fit for me. I've often stressed over design team commitments, but truly, working with their product is easy every single time - I love it.
I've had some of my peak cardmaking accomplishments this year. I was published for the first (and the second time!) My first published project was in the November 2015 Happy Holidays special edition by CardMaker magazine. It was a trio consisting of a coordinating card, tag and luminary using Taylored Expressions products, focused on their Nativity Border die. I was thrilled to not only be in the magazine, but one of the trio was pictured on the table of contents page! I also had cards in the British publication Die-Cutting Essentials but I actually haven't seen that one.
Another milestone was reaching 1 million pageviews on my blog. I know that's a fairly meaningless number with the use of things like bloglovin' and feedly - but it still brought a big smile to my face when I saw the number. Thank you all! What means the most is how many of those viewers I feel like I know. I can't believe how much this community cares about each other - it's a wonderful place to be.
Picking cards to put in this post can be difficult. I'm always amazed that some of the cards that I like the most get very few views, while other cards that I'm not even convinced that I should display get lots of attention. I think it probably relates to the memories. The cards that I like may not be the best from a strictly artistic point of view - but I love what they remind me of. So here are my favorites for the year, picked for a variety of reasons. I hope you enjoy them too.
Products by Taylored Expressions
Sponging doesn't always work well for me, but this was an exception. I love the soft color gradient behind that beautiful tree
