 Welcome to Espresso Crest Design. Mary here. Thank you for stopping by on this cloudy but warm Tuesday, February 27th, I believe. Okay, today we're going to do some little specimen, um, I don't know. What are they? Specimen cards? I can't remember the name of them. Now my mind is blank. But first the usual thank yous and hello's. Thank you to Jennifer, Sue, Florine, Karen and Karen. And to my new subscribers, thank you for your kind comments and welcome and I hope you will keep visiting. So let me get through the housekeeping and then I'll show you where I am on the blueberry pie journal and then we will get started. Okay, first of all I have bees and flowers and if you go to this on Shopify you will get bees and flowers and this 374 page bee keeping encyclopedia or bee encyclopedia. What's it called? Appiary. I forget the title of this encyclopedia but it's everything about bees and I just printed out one page. So on Etsy you'll just get the 10 page bees and flowers but on Shopify you'll get the complete everything you would need for a bee journal. Well not everything you would need but some pretty good basics for a bee journal for I think less cost than it is on Etsy. Yeah, I have dragonflies in flowers. Love this. I think it's, I don't know if that's a cherry apple blossom or I don't know what it is but it's beautiful. These are spring so it has to be something spring, something blooming and then you'll get I think it's garden of spring with just the flowers and this goes with the previous collections. They all work together if you're looking for spring journal stuff and this I love, absolutely love so I had to come down and work with it. Antique floral garden I think is the name and it just looks like an antique painting so I just love it, it's very rich. So that was what I led to this and I made some Easter tags with it and then I came up with these to do with it which we're going to do today and what else? Then I saved every little piece and made some, these will probably be dangles once I get them finished. If I have time I'll show you how to do that but it was very easy I just used some packaging tape. So what you'll need, you'll need some glue, you'll need a punch, you'll need a two and a half by five inch strip of paper and two little two and a quarter inch squares to go inside like this and that'll be, that's pretty much it, some glue and you can do these however you want. I forgot to ink that, if I have time I'll ink it but okay here's a little progress report on the blueberry pie journal I might add a little more I don't know I got the book corners on I used that piece that was in the pocket to reinforce the back so what I wish I would have done is the front has two pieces from the packaging to make it sturdy but when I got to the back it only has one and a half which is the pocket so I wish I would have put two and then the pocket so that the back and the front both have the same weight that makes sense so the next one I just choose that to reinforce the back a little bit and I could have swore that was straight yesterday and now it looks like it's not oh my god okay then I just refilled that with a little tag and I'm gonna do some more little ephemera out of packaging got my strings tidied up just did a bow because I saw someone do that and I thought it was kind of cute and so it'll be a work in progress okay let's get started for your sake I have these already glued and scored so I'm just going to fold and burnish hopefully oh there we are fold and burnish and this one I I used every inch of that paper so this one's going to be a little sparse on the front as compared to the back but I did it anyway I'll say I'm going to go like that okay so then I took my punch and I might be moving out of the camera but because this is two and a half by two and a half you just line your punch up in there and I pretty much have it pushed in entirely and I really didn't care if I ended up in the center but first of all let me show you a trick if you care about ending up in the center just reminds me take a little punch circle this is a nice clever trick pop it on there and then you can line up your punch with that circle but I'm not going to do that I didn't find it necessary for this so I'm just going to punch I have to ink those edges I'm left with my circle it's going to line it up as best I can and I know I'm going to lose a lot on the front of this one but that's okay I have all these beauties and I can embellish that a little if I want so then what I did is because I didn't want to mess with glue the first one I did with glue but then I had a hard time getting my little card in there so then I was like well what I really want is a channel and you can use washi tape for this you can use a folded paper channel let me get this a little flatter let me make sure I'm in here you can use a little paper channel or washi once this gets burnished you won't even see it and this is the um what's it called not glossy much tape burnish that in there that's my top this might be my last pull from this tape I have to get more tape I can't believe it press like so I'm seeing you can't even tell that's there trim it off okay there's one and then that way your specimen is nice and open so you have some wiggle room in there okay now we're going to do the tab I was trying to think of what I could do with these let me take this one and I'll show you here what I came up with but I didn't like it because it's a little bulky I thought of making doing one like that and I just stapled it but it makes the um makes the opening a little bulky so I don't like it as much as just doing a tab and then this one had a little a little gap there in the between the text so I just covered it up with another little piece of scrap so I'm just wondering if I could use this somewhere for a decoration and see if it's going to bulk up the entire thing let me just slip this in here and see what happens uh no it's going to show through so I don't like that okay I'll figure something out to do with those circles so there's one and you can use anything for this by the way I was using my scraps so it's again it's two and a half by five and you just fold it in the center you can use a large index card I couldn't find mine but I have cards like this so you can use anything one of them I used a card greeting card back which one was it this one it was just a greeting card you can actually still see some in there but that didn't bother me you can't actually read it so you can use anything to make these use up your scraps so this one just needs a uh tab and I'll give you some more ideas but look at the back so these are definitely for tucking because you don't want to lose you don't want to lose those beautiful flowers but of course you could make them with whatever you want pages whatever getting a hint of gold actually the pen appears to be running on stuff paint I think this is actually an oil because it has gems that's for sure okay let me burnish that let it let that dry a second and we'll do the tape on this one then we'll do the tabs this tape I think is about done so my week my week was the usual um which anyway it was Tuesday my daughter started getting a fever that went up to 103 and I thought well that's a little odd considering it's day five why is she getting a fever and she hasn't had a fever since the first day so there's my tape on the top first channel I'm calling it a channel why is she getting a fever so it went down finally to 99 and then it started going back up again so we said okay we're going to er so we did and she didn't think she had pneumonia thankfully but she had influenza A and they put her on a nebulizer and then that helped her feel a little better and the fever didn't come back but she missed the entire week of school she said she could go back once she didn't have a fever for 24 hours but then by the time that happened they had off Friday and Thursday was a flex day so she took the entire week to recover and she's pretty much pretty much back to normal but you know I think when you get the flow when you're younger it's a lot worse because I started getting sick feel as bad as her and my husband didn't get sick oh geez I'm peeling off my I need some glue I'm peeling off my digital there okay so we have two ready to go of course you can put your little whatever you want in the center of there if you want a butterfly an insect stamp whatever you want but I them with just the text because I didn't want to lose the um I just like them like that I might put something in we'll see I'm gonna make a little brush here and get that glue back down so that was my week oh and then remember when I said these were indestructible well they are except from everything except for a cat falling through the ceiling on top of them that it was either that same day might have been that same day I was upstairs at my desk and I heard a crash and I thought it was on the roof actually and it wasn't above me it was below me and that little boy what they do is they jump on this chair that I'm sitting on because there's a window behind me with a ledge and once they get on that ledge they can see through the gap in the drop ceiling so they think I'm just gonna go walking around in the ceiling and see what I can see and he fell through the ceiling everything on this table was scattered we went to the store I think to pick up the medicine and get some soup or something I forget but she called and said don't get mad but something in your craft room might be broken and then I came home and looked at it and I was just like are you kidding me are you kidding me so that was fun so I didn't even deal with it until the next day and then I came down here and I was livid first I thought okay everything looks you're lucky you didn't break my guillotine sitting here beside me you're lucky you didn't break my glass mat you're lucky you didn't break this and that and the other and then I saw everything in that tray scattered all over the table I must have left it open and that was the end of that oh there is some brown in there oh okay I think I'm going to use that for a tab and we'll make both of them the same there's some blue in there perfect okay this is this three okay let's just cut it in half now we will get rid of the scrap this is quadrupled that's okay it'll be sturdy let's let me see if I can get it apart and again get two for one no there we go let's just do that so that was that was my week put that there there there or the opposite yeah I think that needs trimmed a little it's a little long give it a straight line a little more take it off that'll work get both of these the same size do you like my cutting there I've been practicing how to cut straight um I think I'm gonna try a different corner see if I can get something a little more decorative here so I've played nurse all week got a little sick myself took a day off now I want to make sure yeah sometimes I don't care if I have this going sideways so I think I'm gonna have this text going like this put this like this that's what I'm gonna do and then what else happened I don't know we had a interesting story in the newspaper they found an 18 well actually it's worth more than that a gold rare lego piece and it reached a bit of $18,000 and before another they had it listed before and it went as high as $33,000 and then the person didn't send in the money so they put it up again and this time it did sell oh that's pretty that's pretty look at that those two papers they're not even close to being the same but they work I forget where I used that paper on my one of my tag videos now let me see what's gonna happen in here oh that works that works so I'll leave that one horizontal so yeah the other thing is the thermostat might be broke that's why I'm in my heavy hoodie it's freezing down here came down wondered why it was so cold after that very cold night we had unusually cold for well I don't know usually that would be the entire month of February but for the new normal unusually cold and it came down and it was freezing and turned up the heat and it didn't come on so it's a time of year I think I think they know if you might be getting a tax refund okay time for everything to break just repair the oven fix the oven that means it's probably time for the hot water tank to go as well okay look at that all different all beautiful the backs oh and I'm going to have one or two sheets of this for you as a freebie in this video look at that I love this paper I truly love this paper I can't I can't I'm sure this is going to be going for some wax paper vignettes positive now these I just took scraps every little scrap I had left over put it on some um put it on whatever piece of whatever had a had enough space put one on the front and on the back took some of this packaging tape went over both sides ran it through the press and then punched it out and that's how I made all of these because I didn't want to I did all of that with scraps I made this with one little circle I just wanted to use up all these little scraps so I have two circles somewhere I have to do something with and I'll figure out something to do with them that's for sure and that's how I use up every little piece okay another simple week specimen specimen holders I feel like there's something a name escaping me but I'm probably I don't know you let me know what it is okay everyone I hope I hope that next week is a lot less eventful and we can get back to uh something more exciting but these are fun and you'll just enjoy looking at that beautiful paper and these I'm going to put on something easter I don't know what but they'll be going for Easter gifts or something so okay everyone thank you so much for your time and thanks for hanging out with me I'll see you next time bye