Coffee, How I Love Thee

Coffee is my nicotine.

I was caffeine free once. That was before I started working at a place that serves the really good stuff. I’m talking any bean of my choice, fresh roasted right downstairs. Unlimited drinks, including my favorite: sugar-free vanilla lattes with soy milk. Mmmm. My cup hath runneth over every day since. So hath my addiction.

Last week, I decided to quit coffee. Hubs and I are heading on a vacation to Paris, Madrid, and Barcelona this weekend. The US dollar is worth, like, one bazillionth of a Euro, and I didn’t want to spend the equivalent of a small farm in Kansas for a cup of coffee every morning. So, on Thursday, I survived the entire day without a single sip of the brown stuff.

Very bad idea.

I survived alright. But everyone around me felt the wrath of my decaffeination. You would think I hadn’t showered for a week, the way people were avoiding me. I’m sure they were just intimidated by the permanent scowl engraved on my face. By the end of the day, my head was throbbing louder than a Metallica concert. Poor Hubs. He bore the brunt of my barking when he got home.

The next morning, I got to work and made a beeline for the espresso machine to make myself a steaming hot latte. Just one more cup. Then I’ll quit. I ground three tablespoons of beans and pulled a perfect espresso shot. The crema in that glass was more beautiful than a Van Gogh painting. Closing my eyes, I took a sip. Mmmm, sooooo gooood. If I ever got stuck on a deserted island, I’d take coffee over food any day. Caffeine flowed through my veins and my headache subsided. Rich, brown, liquid nicotine.

Maybe I can postpone the coffee quittin’ for a bit until after our Europe trip…

I also made a coffee themed card this weekend, to celebrate my non-quitting.

Supplies: SU (Stampin’ Up) Close to Cocoa ink, PI (Papertrey Ink) Berry Sorbet and Sweet Blus inks, ribbon, and paper, MFT (My Favorite Things) Hot Stuff clear stamps, acrylic blocks. Not pictured: Nestabilities dies, Cuttlebug die cutting machine.

I know not everyone is a stamper, so I’ll introduce the products I use as I make my cards. This is an example of a clear stamp. It peels off of an acetate sheet and adheres to an acrylic block, the same way a repositionable decal sticks to your car window. Clear stamps are inexpensive to produce and don’t need wood blocks, therefore they are less expensive than red rubber stamps.

Here’s another stamp from the set. A tip for clear stamps: I keep mine in CD cases with the spines labeled. Stored this way, they barely take up any precious desk real estate.

You can see from this example that clear stamps don’t ink as well as red rubber stamps. The ink tends to pool on the clear stamps, so details don’t come out as nicely. However, as the clear stamps are broken in, less pooling will occur and the images will be smoother.

I decided to use a few Nestabilities dies to accent the stamp.

Here, the stamp is shown after it has been cute out and layered on colored paper.

Next, I cut this pretty pattered paper on a slant.

I added a touch of ribbon and adhered the layer onto my light pink card base.

And here’s the final product. Coffee + friends, my of my favorite things.
(Especially the coffee).