Aloha, all!
Last week was a long hard week and, as you might be able to tell with the lack of postings, it did not provide much opportunity for crafting. But the string of visits to various medical and dental facilities is over for now, and I’m back at having fun making greeting cards.
Even though I wasn’t in my craft room creating, I did have the opportunity to start to get organized for the upcoming new Stampin’ Up! Catalog. Part of that entailed adding a red dot to the stamp cases of the sets that are going to be retiring as of the end of next month. Unfortunately, several of those sets are sets that I really enjoyed working with, especially when they first came out. Today’s set is one of those.
The stamp set is Garden in Bloom, and the variety of flowers, leaves and butterflies works well with so many different color combinations. There’s even a bee in their for an extra special touch. But for today’s project, I kept to the smaller flower and leaf stamps, and I used the colors featured in this week’s Create with Connie and Mary Thursday challenge. The colors are Calypso Coral (the flower outline stamps); Peekaboo Peach (the stamps for the fill inside the flowers); and Pear Pizzazz (the leaf outlines and fill. I thought that the Petal Burst Embossing Folder was perfect to set off the central element of the card. And of course the Pear Pizzazz 3/8″ Shimmer Ribbon was a perfect color accent. For the mats for the stamped layer, I used Pear Pizzazz and Peekaboo Peach cardstock. The final touch of embellishments were the Calypso Coral Enamel Shapes circles that are the centers of the flowers.
The most fun about this project is the way I stamped the Whisper White square. I used my Stamparatus! I arranged the cardstock square inside a template I’d made with the same size opening as the square I was stamping, set an image to stamp in one spot (for example, in the corner) and then just turned my cardstock square 90 degrees and stamped it again – four times in all. I did that for the outline and fill of both the leaves and flowers. One thing that I usually don’t do but did in this case is cut a stamp. Both of the small leaves are on the same stamp, but I wanted to stamp each leaf by itself. So clip those stamps I did (quite a while ago, in fact).
Here are the products that I used for this project. Three of the products are going to be retiring at the end of May: the stamp set; the Peekaboo Peach ink and cardstock; and the Enamel Shapes that I used for the flower centers. While the stamp set will be around at least until May 25th, once the Peach items and the Enamel Shapes are sold out, they’ll no longer be available. To get an up-to-date list of what’s retiring and what’s still available, click on the “2018 Retiring Stampin’ Up! Products” at the top of the page.
