happy new year!

a happy and healthy new year to all you readers out there. it's been a year of ups and downs and roundabouts--thanks for sticking with me. i'm looking forward to a whiz-bang of a 2006 where some of these ideas i've been sharing get taken to the next level.

i'll finish with a favorite, rendered in colored pencil for my Aunt Dorothy:

pop-ability

there's nothing like the birthday of a relative to help me kick some creativity into high gear. let me clarify. there are really only 2 people i pull out all the stops on birthday cards for: my niece and nephew. so as soon as one of their birthday comes round, i find myself pulling all-nighters so i can outdo last year's creation. unfortunately, that bar is not getting any lower.

this year i decided to break the 2 dimensional barrier for my nephew Sonny's fifth. i have a really cool paper engineering book that shows how to create all the basic pop-up movements. naturally, i disregarded the advice about starting simple and chose to combine 2 pop-ups. i admit this was foolish. i'm a victim of my own competition.

here's the card, emcee'd by Albert the Crab: