Tinkerin In Ink with Tanya: Grateful For Brown Sugar!

What is better than some brown sugar and steel cut oats with craisins on a crisp autumn morning? Not much, I can tell you! The slightly chewy goodness of the oats makes me crave breakfast anytime! While there are no craisins in this card, I still think it is delicious :)
I made this card while on vacation in August. You would have been quite impressed with my packing skills for this trip :) I brought quite an array of stamping supplies in only the Demo Business Bag, the Sizzix Drs Bag, and a Scrapfolio paper file.

We frequently go on weekend trips to visit family, and I always have things I need to get done for my stamping assignments. So I have started keeping a Go-Bag of sorts for travel stamping. I got this bag at convention in 2011, I think. Here is how I keep it stocked.
I have almost all of the main colors in Stampin' Spots, and I continue to fill in with the spots from My Paper Pumpkin kits each month. I keep all of the spots in this bag, making sure they are good and juicy about twice a year. So when we travel, I just add the ink pads I need that I don't have in spots to the bag.
I also took some pieces of chipboard and wound a yard each of the current ribbons that I have on them and put them in baggies. I stock this bag with a package each of rhinestones and pearls, a bottle of Tombow adhesive, some Sticky Strip, scissors, paper piercer and mat, white gel pen, pencil, black pen, dimensionals, and a lighter for sealing the ends of ribbon. There is a bottle of stamp cleaning solution and a rag tucked in there too. I have an older paper trimmer and a ruler tucked in the back pocket and keep extra cutting blades in the front zipper panel.
When we are going somewhere, I decide what sets I need to bring with. By consolidating stamp sets in the cases, I was able to get 28 sets in just 7 clear mount and 2 wood mount cases! Wow, huh! Then I load it all in the bag. I can usually slip some extra stuff in here like Washi tape and other embellishments. Oh, and I load my clear blocks in the side pockets. This little bag gets QUITE heavy by the time I am done loading it :)

Then, there is the Big Shot. I feel like I can't live without this thing, lol! In this bag, I can fit my machine, the magnetic platform, the multipurpose platform and cutting plates, and a variety of other items. I stick all of my embossing folders into a wood mount case and tuck that in there. I have taken all of my framelits out of the plastic envelopes they come in, and put them on magnetic sheets cut to no more than 5"x7". I can fit about 10 sets of framelits into a wood mount case this way. I also end up adding a few punches, and all of the small punches fit in another wood mount case. Sometimes my Blendas and SU markers go in a couple gallon baggies and get thrown in here too.

Now, this puppy has at least 4 sheets of every color paper we carry in it, at all times. There are 7 pockets in it, and I divide the paper into the color families. I put scads of extra neutrals in though, since I use a ton of them. I also have watercolor, vellum, glimmer, and foil paper in here.

So when it is time to go out of town for the weekend, it still takes me longer to pack my stamping stuff than my suitcase. But not much! Since I am awake for most of the night even on my days off, I find I have a lot of time on my hands when everyone else is sleeping. I just can't get to sleep before 5am most of the time. And when we are out of town, I usually am back up again by 9am.

Ok, now do you want to see the card?

I was going to feature the Gratitude For Days set on the Fall 2014 SA hop, but the person that signed up to use Four Feathers had to back out, so I switched to Four Feathers. But before I knew I could switch, I started working on some ideas with this set. I combined it with the starburst image from Kinda Eclectic, and went with some cool autumn colors. You can't really see them, but I stmped the leaves in Blackberry Bliss on the same colored paper. The Gold Encore ink sows up marvelously well though! This card absolutely needed some texture to liven it up, and Zig Zag did the trick.