Introducing Our Design Team Captain: Amber MacMurtry

Today we would like to introduce our first design team member, Amber MacMurtry; owner of Doodles Paper Playground.

Amber has been the pioneer member of the White Rose Crafts Design Team, helping Kay Barnes to develop the team guidelines and requirements and offering support and training to the other design team members (and Kay, on occasion) when needed. Amber is a Vermont native since she was 6 months old. She enjoys singing, reading fantasy novels, animated and B rated horror movies and, of course, paper crafting. Amber has been crafting in one form or another since she was a little girl creating dioramas to accompany her book reports for school, but she really began paper crafting in college. She began her journey by starting a scrapbook as a gift for her stepmother following the birth of her baby sister, 18 years her junior, but never really caught the scrapbooking bug--the evidence of which is that unfinished first scrapbook still sitting in her stash today!

Created October 2017 with
Fiskars-Thanks a Latte stamp set

In her mid 20s, Amber went through a divorce and found herself with more personal time than she'd had since college. She decided in the fall of 2009 that she would try to save herself money and make her own Christmas cards to send to friends and family. (Its okay, I'll wait until you stop laughing). 10 weeks and about $200 later, her cards were complete and she was hooked!

Fast forward to 2014.

Amber had continued to create homemade Christmas and Birthday cards for her friends and family
since she caught the bug 5 years earlier, and even attempted to start an Etsy store to sell her designs, unsuccessfully. In September of 2014, her son was born with a birth brain injury due to oxygen deprivation. She was devastated and felt herself slowly descend into an abyss of depression over the next few months. Knowing that paper crafting had been cathartic and therapeutic for her in the past, Amber began using the supplies she had collected over the years and started developing her arsenal of cardmaking techniques. She found that being creative helped her take her mind off of the unknowns of her son's condition and prevented her depression from worsening.

Fast forward again to 2017.

For the past 3 years, Amber has continued to hone her craft adding new supplies and coloring mediums to her tool box and constantly seeking new and interesting techniques to try. She would describe her style as a combination of clean and simple, bright and cheerful and scene builder cards.

In September, she was asked to join her first Design Team. Although it didn't prove to be a good fit, that turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Shortly after, she found herself chatting with Kay after she had placed one of several supply orders and they started discussing the possibility of developing a design team to promote the fantastic and affordable products available in the White Rose Crafts LLC shop. Almost as fast as you can say Craft Supplies, the White Rose Design team was born. Over the next few weeks, Kay and Amber added two other talented members to the team and worked on dotting the I's and crossing the T's on the team guidelines and requirements. Amber has become a valuable asset to Kay over the past weeks--encouraging her to expand her product line and social media presence--and together, they have come up with an exciting schedule of events for the next few months. So stay tuned!

Thanks for Visiting,

White Rose Crafts LLC