Sunday, October 24, 2010

Introducing Melissa Rodgers

Melissa has been a Stampin’ Up Demonstrator for 11 years, and says that she can’t even remember what her life was like before stamping!  Since she was very young, Melissa has always enjoyed crafts. She tells us that, once she discovered stamping and Stampin’ Up!, she has found that they have supplied her with all the tools and options she could ever need to create!
Melissa finds inspiration from everything around her: magazines, browsing an antique store, enjoying the outside, or brainstorming with her blog buddy, Gayla.  She can’t single out a single stamping experience, but states that nearly every get-together with friends and stamping has been life-changing for her.  Melissa loves the new people she’s met and the friends she’s made through the craft.
Distressing is probably Melissa’s favorite technique, and she’s fondly referred to as the “Distressing Queen” by her group of SU! demonstrators.  She says that she can’t pick out a favorite project as there are” just too many”, but says that one can usually spot her project among a group of creations because of her stamping and distressing style.
Melissa has to be extremely organized to fit in her stamping time.  She’s a full time Process Manager, a mother of 5, and a grandmother of 7!  All of her kids live within 10 minutes of their house, so she sees them often and says that her family is her life.  Her husband and her son remodeled her office to make a stamping space for her, and she says she can’t wait to use the space as a full-time stamper!  She typically utilizes this stamping space in the early morning hours before heading to her “day job”, a few evenings a week, and again several hours over the weekend if she’s lucky!
Melissa’s stamping tip that she shares with us is to be kind to ourselves and to our ideas.  Often, she says we are too critical of our work.  If we find that our project isn’t turning out the way we think it should, she tells us that we should walk away, and when returning, we just might have the “aha!” moment we needed to make things fall into place, to become the project that we perhaps visualized in the first place!
We can’t wait to see the creations that Melissa is so eager to share with us during the Royal Blog Tour! 

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