Simply Elegant Paper Crafts

{Caardvarks} 5 star challenge & Let's Do Math

5 different embellishments? It never really occurred to me how many I use normally. I guess my answer is 1-3; I tend to use brads/eyelets, ribbon, primas, an occasional staple, and rub-ons (do they count?) But 5 different embellishments all at once? How to create a card without overloading it...less is more, right? Hmmmm....

This card has MM brads (2 sizes), ribbon, primas (2 sizes), MM buttons, and a MM page pebble. That's 5, right? The cs is DCWV and the dp is BoBunny.

These challenges have been very good for me. I've been in a rut, using my same favorite sketches over & over. Even though I have been trying to do something different, there have been only subtle differences. In other words, I'm still in my box. The past few days my brain has been saying, "Think outside the box." This is reminiscent of my favorite math teacher from high school. Math was always my favorite subject, but Mrs. Trabbic was largely responsible for challenging me to be even better. Even when I became a secondary math teacher myself, I would recall how Mrs. Trabbic would explain how to solve certain problems so that we all understood. Yes, she made even those pesky word problems seem easy, "A train leaves going north...a second train..." You get the idea. But algebra is cookbook to me. You always follow the same recipe to yield the result. See, I love order. I have learned that my cards do not always have to be perfectly symmetrical, nor mounted with perfect right angles everywhere. It is art. (This was really hard for me when I was a beginner. Go ahead, you can laugh at me!) But Mrs. Trabbic often provided brain teasers, like the 9 dots problem. It goes like this: "Without lifting your pencil or retracing over any line segments, connect all nine dots in just 4 line segments. Hint: think outside the 9 dots."
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Once we found that solution, she would say, "Now do it with just 3 segments. Hint: think outside the box." I hope I accomplished thinking outside the box, or outside the 9 dots today. I certainly was challenged. I did use a variation of a sketch I saw at http://gotsketch.blogspot.com/. So my question for you, my blog reader is this, "Do right brain people go through this?"