The Chronicles of Crafting: As If I Needed A Reason

Sunday, March 13, 2011

As If I Needed A Reason

I was strolling through Blog-Land today and stumbled upon a site that had me sitting bolt upright:

http://www.operationwritehome.org/

I have an alarming accumulation of paper crafting supplies as well as rubber stamps. I think if I set all my rubber stamps end-to-end, I could probably get to the moon and back in short order. Embarrassing, I know. There was a time when I did rubber stamping projects almost daily. When my son was having a particularly rough patch of health issues and required some pretty serious surgery, though, the crafting sort of fell by the wayside. A year earlier, I had also had some surgery on my right shoulder, which left me with the rather unpleasant diagnosis of RSD or CRPS. Not many people know about this disorder and I don't like discussing it because it is pretty complicated, very painful, and there are no known cures (and only mildly palliative pain management in my case). You can read about it here if you'd like to know more: http://rsds.org/index2.html. Fast forward to 2008, and I had yet again another major surgery which knocked me out of commission for about six months....and all of this added up to a loss of interest (and some ability) to make cards and other things.

I had rebuilt the interior of my craft room right before my son had his surgery and had put in an upper and lower cabinet set with a worktop, intending for it to be a rubber stamping workstation. And it's lovely. Only, it hasn't seen any action since it was built. (Insert sad face here.)

So, maybe it's time to turn that frown upside down, de-stash a bit, get a little creative (within Operation Write Home's guidelines, very important to read if you're interested in participating), and do some good. Sounds like a win-win situation to me!

Some samples of things I've done in the past (and I will probably send at least a couple of these along with the new ones):