Gorilla Shipping Tape

I recently received a free full size trial of the new Gorilla Shipping Tape for my participation on Smiley360.  Since I do a lot of selling on Amazon and eBay, this was a very welcome freebie for me.  In the past I've used several different brands of shipping tape, and most of the time the tape is too thin and does not hold up well, or it has a good thick consistency, but the strip isn't as wide, making it so I have to use more tape to cover the seams of the boxes that I am sealing.

First of all, the Gorilla shipping tape is thick and strong.  I don't have to worry about it tearing easily, giving me piece of mind that it will hold up through the entire shipping process.

And, if you look at the picture above, you can see on the right is the Gorilla tape which is considerably wider than the brand on the left.  This really saves me a lot of time and tape.  One strip down the middle and I am done sealing.

Overall, I am very happy with this product and I think I have found a new favorite! Although the tape does cost more, it really is worth it.

I Love Zentangles - Artist Trading Cards

One of my favorite quiet time activities is creating.  I especially like to doodle and paint.  I've actually been keeping quite busy with my creativity these past couple of weeks.  This week alone I painted two birdhouses, which I will post about on another day, and two artist trading cards.  I am a member of swap-bot.com, so I basically get prompted to create the artist trading cards, or ATC's for short, by signing up for ATC swaps with other members.  It's fun to create something for someone else and then get a fun surprise in the mail from another artist.  The two swaps I had to swap this week were "Stamped ATC That You Color", and "Zentangle With Red & White"

This was the stamped ATC.  On a piece of black card stock, I stamped the word "love", and then used a baby blue embossing powder and a heat gun to get an embossed effect on the letters.  On the rest I used my favorite Sakura Souffle markers to fill in the text and to create the hearts.  The outlined areas were created with Marvy Opaque Stix.  I really like the light on dark.

Then of course, this is my zentangle on red with white Sakura marker.  I love the raised effect of this markers, and I think they look pretty good on the red background, which is actually a red Sharpie marker on a piece of white cardstock.