got it :-) Lucy

But, as I posted previously, I called Amex (well, actually, it's a 3rd party Amex, so it was really FIA Card Services) and was told that it had been a common occurence at a handful of retailers, that Lowes _was_ one of them, and that it was, indeed a "sham" card read error. Merely designed to discourage you from using the card because of a non-competitive merchant fee. This particular card is only a few months old and works just fine at all other merchants. It isn't the card. And the chances that card readers at two different Lowes just "randomly" started having issues with this card, in the same week, are astronomically small. Somehow I'm not surprised Lowes in involved, because they's always been non-standard in their handling of credit cards. At least on the east coast, until recently the checker always had to enter, manually, the last 4 digits of the card. Any card - Visa, Mastercard, or Amex. Going all the way back to the end of the manual charge card era (yes, I'm old enough to remember that) I've never known ANY other merchant requiring that. My guess is Lowes uses some off-name, discount pay processor that nobody else uses, and they are the ones who have some issue negotiating a merchant fee with Amex or FIA. The other people might not have had a bad experience because they were using "real" Amex cards; though I'm not sure if the back-end transaction belongs to Amex or FIA. (in other words, Amex has now licensed their name and numbering scheme to cards that really are credit cards, mine is the Fidelity one that offers 2% cashback. I suppose it is possible that with certain accounts, the processor tries to exctract part of the cashback out of the merchant fee. In other words the problem isn't mere that it is a 3rd party Amex, but that it's a 3rd party Amex with a good cashback program. I've never carried a balance so I've made a lot of money using it.) This post was edited by davidrt28 on Mon, Dec 29, 14 at 9:48

I have a whole pack of red tht I got at a thrift store.Thanks for the list.

Linda, I mostly use rubber stamps. Some I sent out last year or the year before had a big snowflake on the front of it that I stamped. Then I went over it with glitter glue. Another stamp I used was a group of trees. I used all of the trees in one spot and inked only some of them in another spot on the front of the card to make it look like a bunch of trees on a hill. I used dark green ink and put a few dots of red glitter glue on the trees for decorations. I didn't make any cards this year because I'm catching up on scrapbooks, but when I do make my next ones I plan to try some other ways to do it because I will have more time since I no longer work away from home. I'm not sure what I want to try yet though. I have a Cricut machine to work with now so I'll probably use it. Click on the link below then look on the left hand side of the screen under Gallery and Forums for cards. You may get some ideas from there. One thing I would like to try next time is to plan ahead what kind of card I'm going to make, as far as folding it, then I would like to find the right spot on it to type a message directly onto the card instead of putting it on another sheet of paper and gluing that paper to the inside of the card. It shouldn't be too difficult, I've just never had the time previously. Linda Here is a link that might be useful: card ideas