As you can see, once I finished, I took a look and they were rather nekkid. The edges were too discrete, and it looked like the placemats you weave in kindergarten out of construction paper—all sharp shapes. So—another challenge—use up the glitter pots. I had found 16 pots of various colored glitter in mucilage media at OfficeMax, and my inner three year old was simply enchanted. Multiple colors, multiple shapes, and in colored glazes, to boot!

Well, when I got them home, I found out why they were on sale. Clearly they had been sitting on the shelf for some time, and were beginning to dry up. So saving them for best would be counterproductive—by the time “later” and “best” came, they’d be little wrinkly balls of glop that couldn’t be used. I decided that the new ongoing challenge would be to use these up, too. So I slapped a thick coat of sparkle on the woven cards, which melted the edges away and gave a sparkly dreamy cast to the whole thing. Now the cow and the supermodel looked like they belonged together. Now I get to watch for all kinds of magazines at the garage sales.

But—birthdays. Birthday ATC’s. I have been thinking about “shaker” ATC’s, where there’s a window cut in the front, and then the message shows through the window. If you seal the hole with an acetate sheet, then mount the front card so it’s raised up a smidge, you can fill the space between the front and back cards with “stuff”—glitter, confetti, seed beads—and the stuff will make noise and swish about when the card is moved—a “shaker” card.

So wouldn’t it be fun to make shaker cards with paint chip backgrounds (easy peasy coordinated stripes) filled with assorted rainbow beads? One could print labels with a general happy thoughts wish, and boom! Shaker ATC’s for birthday doings.

And windows—hole in cards that stuff shows through. How about stars and little pics from yarn catalogues to show through the stars? Bits of garments, and the close up shots of swatches, and the more distant photo clips to show the color ranges? And then another general happy wishes sticker, and some more cards –not quite as labor-intensive as the shakers, but ornamental.

One could go back through cards sent by other artists, and send the A-list shakers for their natal anniversary, and the B-list stars, and feel quite good indeed