I'm pleased to introduce you to Pam, Fiskateer #8040.  It's so much fun to learn about our fellow Fiskateers.

I moved to Cooper, TX, three years ago after 22 years in Alaska. Most of those years we lived in the ‘bush’ – three hours and two snow-covered mountain passes from the nearest craft store. I’m not sure how I made it!?! Now I am only 25 minutes from a Hobby Lobby. Life is so good.

I’ve been married 33 years to a wonderful man who thinks I make great cards and who knows not to use my orange-handled scissors to cut wire. We were never able to have children, but we do have a very spoiled toy poodle we call April. She runs the place. 

I don’t really have a favorite song, but I listen mostly to Christian praise and country music.

          I do a lot of crafts but my favorite by far is creating cards. I first started making cards while living in Alaska. One day I needed a card and did not have time to make the six-hour round-trip to Fairbanks. So, I decided to try and make a card. I had a sample sheet of white cardstock that came with a new printer. I folded it in half and cut shapes from a Lipton Tea box and more from a Cheerios box. I was hooked from that moment on.

I’ve been making cards for about seven years now. I am mostly self-taught depending heavily on craft magazines and books. Now that I live where internet is available I visit the fabulous craft blogs like this Fiskateers’ blog and those of other paper artists. There are so many! Who knew!?! I even have one of my own now. It is www.cottagebelow.com .

         One of my favorite things in card making is to step outside of the box and have something different or unusual about my cards. I’ve made cards with green flowers and black flowers and even gray flowers. I usually make multi-layered flowers. I also like making 3D vellum flowers. I don’t always use a stamp for my flowers. I make vellum rosebuds, foxgloves, Texas bluebonnets and other varieties of flowers made up in my mind. There are examples of those cards in my pictures on this blog.

My first published card (Creative Home Arts) had one of my vellum flowers on it. I found out recently that I will have another card published in Paper Crafts magazine this summer. Yay! My ultimate goal is to become a design team member on a blog or two or many.

One other thing about card making is that when I am working at my desk, I am not grazing in the kitchen. For a long time, I had trouble with bingeing. Now whenever I feel the urge to overeat, I go first to my desk and work on a card. I think paper crafting could be the next weight-loss craze! 

My tidbit of advice for life? 

 We often cannot change the circumstances in our lives and bad things will happen to us all. You can choose to be miserable and make those around you miserable as well, or you can choose to be happy. I choose happy! 

My crafting tip? I have two! 

1.   If you are heat embossing, first paint the card with cornstarch using a one-inch paint brush. Then, brush the cornstarch away. Doing so really cuts down on static electricity that causes stray embossing powder to stick to the card where you don’t want it to be. Don’t you just hate that?

 

 2.   Be adventurous! Experiment with your cards. It’s only paper and you can start over if you need to.