Welcome!

     After following a lot of blogs over the last few months, I have finally taken the plunge and started one of my own. My main focus on this blog will be rubber stamping, but as you can see from the header, I am all over the place, hence my title: The Eclectic Blogger. I know nothing about what I am doing here, so the look of this will change over the next few months. Hopefully I will figure out how to make it more attactive, and I will be adding things to the sidebar. I have quite a lot that I want to say, but I will be putting a little on each day because you don't want to read a novel in my first post. I am going to start with a few samples of my stamp art, if I can figure out how to get them on here. I have been following a lot of stamp artist's blogs over the last few months, and I have see a lot of wonderful, beautiful samples of their work. I am not where I want to be, but as a result of studying their work, my stamping has improved, and I am enjoying it tremendously. (It didn't hurt that I bought a small fortune worth of supplies, either.) My photography skills are minimal, so that should be improving also as time goes on. Please cut me some slack at first; I am very new at all this and don't know what in the world I am doing, but I'm having fun! I hope you will come back and see what is going on here often, and that you will enjoy what you see.
   Now, about the samples that you see at the top of the page where I DO NOT WANT THEM! I have done everything I know to do, and they are STILL THERE!!!ARGHHHHHHHH!!! Ok, I am calm now. Taking deep breaths... I told you you would have to overlook things and cut some slack. The first card is one that I did several years ago, and is a flat card. I am now doing a lot of layers, and the second card is one I did last week. The background paper was stamped using a clear stamp and an acrylic block with grid lines, and the lacy piece behind the oval was done with a Fleur de Lis pendant die from Spellbinders. I stamped the words and snowflakes on the oval with Stampin' Up! shimmer paint in frost white, which comes out looking pretty silvery. The words aren't exactly silver, and there is a story behind that. I used a sponge dauber to ink the stamp with the shimmer paint, but I didn't have a new one so I used one that had a little pink chalk on it. That gave it a pinkish cast, which was a good thing because it wouldn't have shown up at all if I had used a clean dauber. Sometimes the stupid things I do work out really well! Of course, in the picture it doesn't show up well so you don't know what I am talking about, but trust me, the writing shows up well in person.
   Okay, I am going to stop now. Please check back in a few days and I will try to have some better pictures of my samples on here. I did a Fall wall hanging that I really loved; I hope to show it to you next time. And I will talk a little about my experience with diabetes. The last year and a half of trying to keep my body healthy and avoid going on insulin has been quite an adventure.
   Thanks for visiting!
Janis Morris