Greetings From ... You

VALRICO - Santa's back at the North Pole, kicking up his feet, but greeting card season is far from over - especially for the multitudes of hobbyists just looking for an excuse to craft a card.

Jeri Fontana is gearing up for Valentine's Day and Mother's Day after that, with birthdays and special occasions in between.

"You can make a card for any season, any occasion," she says.

Fontana started making cards more than 15 years ago and eventually turned it into a business. She's a demonstrator for Stampin' Up, a company that manufactures rubber stamps, punches, cutters, color-coordinated inks and paper and "recipes" for hundreds of cards.

She earns commissions on supplies her students buy. She also gets discounts on her own supplies and even won a spring cruise to Bermuda for her and her husband, John, an Army major.

She's one of 45,000 Stampin' Up demonstrators across the country, teaching progressively more sophisticated techniques in her workshops.

Students learn to use watercolors, add a gold leaf effect or make cardboard look like copper using embossing powders. They can send their creations to friends or stamp them with the Stampin' Up copyright and sell them; they keep all the profit.

Fontana and a group of other military spouses plan to make hundreds of blank Mother's Day cards to ship to U.S. troops in combat zones so the soldiers can send them to their mothers. It's a project for cardmakers across the country.

Hobbyists have been making cards since before card sending became fashionable in the 1850s. Stampin' Up! sprang up in 1988, started by two sisters who couldn't find all they wanted in craft stores.

Through its classes - and those of competitors such as The Angel Co. - legions of hobbyists, mostly women, have taken up the scissors.

Myla Scheid, who attends some of Fontana's Stampin' Up! classes, gets a lot of her materials and stamps from craft stores. She has been at it for about as long as Fontana.

Scheid started when a friend wanted to show her a new hobby. "I put the kids to bed and we started rubber stamping."

Xenia Crow went to one of Fontana's workshops a couple of months ago and liked it so much that she, too, signed up to become a Stampin' Up! demonstrator.

"To me, it was the stress relief," the intensive-care nurse says.

She loved chatting with and learning from the other hobbyists.

The social interaction is a big part of it, Fontana says, noting that hobbyists tend to turn the workshops into parties. And at the end of the session, she says, they have created a nice card to send someone.

"You know, letter writing is lost. As busy as everyone is, it's all e-mail," Fontana says.

"So to get a card in the mail, No. 1, with a handwritten note, is huge. But then to have it handmade says so much more."

CRAFT CONNECTIONS

To find a Stampin' Up! demonstrator near you, go to www.stampinup.com and click "Find a demonstrator." To find an Angel Co. "Angel," call (785) 820-9181 or go to www.ismyangel.net/Locator.