So what do you do with all your retired printed paper?  Well, here's an idea!  Grab your punches and get to work!

This was a card I designed for my Stamp-a-Stacks last weekend, and I had a blast doing it!  You see, I have this enormous supply of retired Stampin' Up!® Designer Series Paper from years and years-worth of collecting…… and the really cool thing is that because the colors stay fairly standard because of our own color collections, eventually you accumulate enough designs to do a mix-and-match collage type project like this! 

So I dug and dug and dug sheet-by-sheet in my special "retired papers" box – for about an hour – and came up with these colors that I thought went pretty well together….. and just tossed 'em out there for use.

I have admired the stamp set "Season of Friendship" for the entire time it's been in our line, but until recently have never broken down and bought it because I figured it would retire the moment I did.  But since it made it for at least this entire next year into the new Idea Book & Catalog I figured I'd take the chance, and I debuted my new tree stamp last weekend with this card.

Now, some of my ladies are very literal when they copy an example I've set up for these make & take events, and try to place and space every little detail exactly as I lay it out. Most of the time that works just fine, but every so often that's a little too restrictive for a design that's all about "random".  And THIS time it would have completely eliminated the pure joy of just arbitrarily punching circles and seeing what you end up with.  So while I was a bit concerned about the potential for that happening with *this* card, I needn't have worried.  In fact I was downright pleased to see that every single stamper got into the spirit of the design and just punched and arranged to her heart's content!  Some cards ended up similar to mine, and others had the tree's stamped branches completely covered with "leaves"……. but EVERY card ended up looking great regardless!  Very cool!  Can't wait to try something like this again!