I have loved paper crafting for a long time

Stamps I purchased at the Stamp Scrap Art Tour in Mesquite on January 22

 I want to make two posts today. Because whether I keep pursuing this blog on future trips to Starbucks (i.e tomorrow, Friday, next week) or not, I am trying to find out what my best "niche" is before going into either free-lance writing or blogging as a money-making venture. I probably won't even share my blog posts on social media until if and when I decide this is going to be a regular thing for me. So, unless you're not me and happen to be reading this, it's more online brainstorming of what I should focus on. It's hard for this journalist turned marketing copywriter who has always made an effort to learn as much as I could about many different things and is passionate about more than a few. So, here's my brainstorming list of passions.

• My faith - I'm a Christian, first and foremost. I enjoy praying, singing and reading my Bible. So sometimes, I'm going to tell you about that. 
• Paper crafts - I was really, really into scrapbooking from 2001 to 2012. Then, for financial reasons and because people just weren't into it as much, I for the most part quit. I still do it every once in a while. And before I quit, I got into two other paper crafts, homemade cards and art journaling. 
• Bible journaling - That's an intersection of the two things listed above that I got into only a few years ago. It's reflecting on one verse (or maybe a short passage) of the Bible and creating an illustration of some sort to go along with that verse. 

I'll digress off the list to tell you that on Saturday, instead of heading to the nearest Starbucks (in Plano, but my husband was in Frisco that day) I went to a stamping convention in Mesquite. It was only the second one in my life. The first was back when Amy's Stamp Store in Riverside, California was still open more than 10 years ago. I went to a stamping convention at the Riverside Convention Center, getting in free because I was helping Amy.

This time I paid $7 admission. I wanted to do this because I recently got somewhat back into stamping. When we were moving, I discovered a box full of stamps in the closet. I thought I had lost them in 2019 when we moved some of our stuff to a storage place in Texas to make our condo in California look less cluttered. I actually had just put the box in the closet and forgotten about it. This was my acrylic stamps. My rubber stamps and my foam stamps were in a box in that same room. Although their whereabouts were known, they didn't get used that much. But I decided to use them some. 

One thing I did was make hand-stamped Christmas cards this year, although with two of my rubber stamps and one of my lost and then found acrylic stamps. They were very simple cards, even compared to what I made in the past. And there are many card-makers who 10 years ago were doing far more fancy cards than I was. 

Stamping has also declined in popularity, so there were only 15 booths at this show. But, what those 15 companies had in the way of samples was truly amazing. In fact, a lot of it wasn't even with stamps. It was with ink, stencils, die cuts, pattern paper, beads and a product I had never seen before called stamping foam. (You press a stencil, a ring or any other object into the foam. You can then use the impression to stamp with, as it won't go back down until you apply a heat gun to it.) I left with my head swimming. 

But I did buy three sets of stamps for my Bible journaling (pictured above.) I think they will help me make those little "in the margins" creations in my journaling Bible look a little better. I also left inspired to use my stamps more. I have a few ideas, but right now the ideas don't translate to anything that wouldn't result in things filling up my closet with clutter. And since getting rid of clutter is something else I'm loving these days, making useless cards isn't on my to-do-list.