Puzzle piece swap

I'm in a really interesting round robin over on the SSReflections yahoo group. If you don't get the SSReflections ezine, you should sign up for it. It's free, and each month it's full of articles from different areas of stamping and scrapping. And I am on their team now, so in March, my first article will be in the ezine, as well as a couple of projects I did. I'll put a link to my article when it's published, but you really should check it out now because it's a very cool ezine, and the Yahoo group is awesome. Anyway, back to the puzzle round robin. Each group has three people in it. Each person creates the background on their own puzzle piece. They then send the puzzle piece to the next person, and that person adds the image. The third person adds the embellishments. I signed up to be in two groups because they're puzzle pieces. They're small and easy to do.

My backgrounds didn't photograph well, so I don't have any pictures of them. They weren't anything dazzling anyway. Just paper. Cool paper, but still just paper. The first piece I added an image to, though, was painted and it was cool before I added my image. This piece belongs to Suzanne Saupe. I was out looking around for something new to try last night, and I found some awesome YouTube videos by Julia Andrus and Suze Weinberg. They had a faux sea glass video that looked interesting, but Suze had a picture show up to a faux dichoric glass technique that intrigued me too. This is my hacked version of them, really just a piece of painted chipboard (painted with Lumiere paints), I dipped it into Interference Blue UTEE that was melted in my melting pot, put the image on top of the hot UTEE. I added some stickles and glass beads to finish it up. It matches her color scheme well, and the woman in the image has a very coy look on her face, which seemed to go well with such an eclectic and interesting background. I can't wait to see what the next person does with it (the next person adds embellishments!).

And now I'm going to use my blog to complain about a delivery company. I won't name it, but it isn't the brown truck. And it is the other big name delivery company. I order a lot of stuff online. I don't particularly like people and I hate shopping in stores. My local stores also don't have a lot of the stuff I like to play with, so I order online and it's a wonderful thing. I'm sure y'all understand. Anyway, a month ago I ordered beads. They were delivered to my neighbor's house. Mistakes are made, right? Of course they are. I didn't make a fuss. I was thrilled my neighbor let me know and we went and picked up the box. One thing to note, our neighbors aren't exactly "next door". We live on a private lane that serves three houses, so this delivery person had a choice of three possible houses. Two of them have numbers on them that don't match our address.

This week, I placed an order from Dick Blick. It shipped on Valentine's day, so I figured it would be Monday at the earliest. I decided to check the tracking and was surprised to find it was scheduled to be delivered today! TODAY!! Saturday!! I left the page open and a few hours later, I hit reload and was even more shocked to find the status changed to "delivered". Since we had been home, and no one had come to deliver anything, I was really shocked. I went to their site and wrote to them. I let them know that this was the second time that they delivered something to me that didn't come to my house, and could they please tell me where they delivered my package. I got a reply that my package had been left by our mailbox. HUH??

Our mailbox is pretty far from our house, and not visible to us. Our lane isn't snowed in or anything, so I don't know why they didn't drive it back. I sent my son up to see if the box was there. It was. On the ground. Just sitting in a bag on the ground, by the main road, where we wouldn't have seen anyone stopping and picking it up had someone gotten curious. More than $200 worth of merchandise, left sitting by the road, in a bag on the ground. On a Saturday, when most delivery companies don't deliver. I'm just a bit annoyed that my package was sitting somewhere, marked as "delivered" by the company, and it could have been stolen and there would have been no way we would have known or would have been able to prove to the company we hadn't gotten it. I wrote to the delivery company again and let them know that the package was there, and that I wasn't happy. I got back a nice note that they strive to handle every package professionally, and they hope the next time they deliver something to me I will be satisfied. Hmmm. Must have missed that it was the second time in a month that they mishandled my package (hehehehehehe, just had a Beavis and Butthead moment).

I wrote to Dick Blick to let them know and to ask if they used any other shippers. I order from them at least once a month. I don't want to have to change vendors. Dick Blick is awesome. They ship fast. I once had a broken item and they immediately apologized and replaced it. They have GREAT prices and I love getting all these products from one place I trust. So I really don't want to have to change vendors. Oh, and a few years ago, this same delivery company had problems delivering here, too. They called me to ask for directions. I gave them directions. The next week they had to deliver again, and they again called for directions. I got a little snotty and asked if they heard of these magic things called computers, where they could actually store the directions so they didn't have to call my house and delay delivery by a day or two. So this is over and over. Okay, done complaining. I had to get that out of my system. I'm still annoyed that someone could have taken my stuff and there's nothing I could have done. Grrrr.