Nacho...Happy Watercolor

Happy Tuesday Stampers! Hope your week is going well!  We have a new Nacho challenge for you starting today! This week it's a sketch! We hope it will inspire you to create with us!

Here is how our sketch inspired me to create this week! I combined some retired items with new InColors and some returning items! So happy that the Hardwood background stamp is staying around for awhile. I inked it with Baked Brown Sugar onto Sahara Sand. Love this look! So sad that the Happy Watercolor stamp set is not being carried over into the new catalog, I didn't ink it enough! I inked it onto the Shimmery White card stock and layered with Blackberry Bliss. 

The background splash was inked with Lost Lagoon, which I stamped off first and then continued stamping. I watercolored the flowers with Blackberry Bliss, Hello Honey and Mossy Meadow. I also colored our Pearls Basic Jewels with our Daffodil Delight Stampin' Blendabilities Markers. 

Thanks so much for stopping by today.  I hope you have a chance to create with us this week. 

Monday Night Stamping with Sketch Frenzy Friday

Hello Stampers! Hope your Monday night is going well.  I'm back today with a new creation inspired by the sketch over at Sketch Frenzy Friday. Even though it's a Monday, I'm already wishing it was Friday. So while I wait, the next best thing is to play along with the designers at Sketch Frenzy Friday. Check them out if you have a chance.

Here is my take on the sketch:

I can't get enough of this DSP! I love it, but I'm trying to use it as much as I can. As I've been mentioning lately, trying to use up my supplies before the new catalog arrives! Oh the anticipation! I'm also happy that the Banner Punch will be carried over into the new catalog. So at least I know I can keep using it even though Sale-a-Bration is now over. Anyhow, hope your have a nice evening!

Thanks for visiting my blog today, until next time! 

Nacho Pinks!

Happy Nacho Tuesday Stampers!! Hope your week is off to a great start! We have a beautiful new Nacho color challenge for you starting today. Beautiful inspiration from my fellow designers, come check us out and play along!

I also used the current sketch from Sunday Stamps, which I also design for. Great opportunity to combine two great blog challenges!

Here is how I used our Nacho color challenge: 

Lots of circles on this card. The large circle stamp is from the February Paper Pumpkin, a great kit! I colored the flower with Rose Red re-inker. 

Thanks for stopping by today! Until next time. 

Wildflower Meadow

Happy Nacho Tuesday Stampers!  If you had the day off yesterday, hope you had a fun day! Welcome back to another fun Nacho Average Challenge!  Today we have a sketch for you to play along with us. Thanks to all of you who have been playing along with us, we love to see your creations.

I flipped the sketch and I inked up the Wildflower Meadow background stamp and embossed it with white embossing powder onto our watercolor paper.  I watercolored the background with Crushed Curry. I think I need to practice my watercoloring strokes. Either that or anything to purchase more supplies. :) 

Thanks for stopping by, until next time.

Flower Shop Duo

Hello Stampers!  Happy Wednesday to you all!  Hope your week is going well.  August is turning out to be super busy and  fun!  Last week we went to three different concerts!  We saw Burno Mars!!  He was amazing!  The kid can sing, play drums and dance! Triple threat!

This past Monday, August 5, I had my Shoe Box Swap with my group.  I'm part of an amazing group, my direct group is with Diana Gibbs-Di's Country Inkers and my sideline is with Rhonda Morgan, Inkin' All Night.  It was so much fun!  The swap theme was to use any of the "Bundled Products" so I chose the Flower Shop stamp set with the coordinating Pansy Punch!  Love this stamp set! This was my swap for the night.  Clean, simple and colorful.

You can also read more about our night on Di's Blog.  She has cool photos of us! I laughed so much!  Oh and I have to share with you convention gifts from Di and Rhonda, in a later post.

I was inspired to continue using the stamp set for a blog challenge, the Dynamic Duos. Love this combo, especially the new Strawberry Slush! So make sure to check out the website for oodles of inspiration. 

Sorry my photo is a bit crooked. Love the way this came out! Two of my fellow demos at our meeting on Monday had created cards similar to this and I wanted to try it out.  Simple! 

Well friends, I better get going!  Hope you have a wonderful afternoon and I'll be back later this week with more to share!

Until next time.

Swallowtail...Bleached

Hello Stampers! Happy Sunday! We have a fun new color challenge for you at Sunday Stamps so make sure you stop by and check out out the designs from my fellow designers. So much beautiful color inspiration.

So the color challenge is to use brown, lavender and turquoise in our creations.  I chose Early Espresso, Wisteria Wonder and Tempting Turquoise. I wanted to play with the Swallowtail background stamp and use the stamping with bleach technique. Have you tried this technique before? It's fun and I remember that Early Espresso is one of my favorite card stock papers to use with this technique. You check out a simple tutorial here.

So I stamped the Swallowtail onto the Early Espresso, I love the way it came out! The base of my card is Tempting Turquoise and layered it with Early Espresso.  I finally busted out my new Brights DSP Stack, love the redesign of the backgrounds! This is the Tempting Turquoise chevron background. I cut out the Swallowtail and used our some Stampin' Dimensionals to adhere it to the front. So that's the front of the card.  You're probably wondering, wasn't it a three color challenge?

Why, yes, it is a three color challenge and I used Wisteria Wonder to decorate the inside of my card. I layered Whisper White onto Wisteria Wonder. For my sentiment, I used one of our hostess sets,  Banner Greetings, which I inked in Wisteria Wonder.  And there you have it my friends.  Simple and quick. Which is funny because I kept looking at my card thinking it needed something more; ribbon, bling? I think simple and quick is good, it makes the butterfly stand out. 

So hop on over to our blog challenge and play along.  You have until August 9th to upload your creation. Thanks for stopping by, until next time! 

Six Sided Sampler & Flower Shop

Happy Sunday Stampers!  Hope your Sunday is off to a beautiful start!  We are in the middle of a heat advisory weekend in Arizona! We reached 118 degrees yesterday! It's HOT!  I'm not a big fan of the heat. I burn easily in the sun, seriously!  Just ten minutes in the sun and I start turning red! Luckily for me, we have a cool color combo at Sunday Stamps to cool me off.  Thank you to ALL of you who joined us for the last challenge, WOW! Such inspiration from all 18 entries!

So this week, the color challenge is to use orange, blue and yellow in our creations. Make sure you stop by our blog to check out all the creations by my fellow designers.

For my card, I started off stamping the polka dot hexagon stamp from the Six Sided Sampler stamp set in Pumpkin Pie onto the Whisper White cardstock.  I did use the coordinating hexagon punch to punch them out, but I wanted some additonal layers and dimension. So I trimmed them off a bit and layered them onto the Pacific Point hexagon punch. Once I had all of that glued I stamped one of the flowers from Flower Shop onto the design.  I kept the rest of the card simple as I wanted to the colors and design to stand out. The sentiment is hard to read but it is from Banner Greetings and it read "Friends Forever". 

Hope this color combo inspires you to create something fun! Remember, our challenges are open for two weeks now. Hope you have a great week. Until next time. 

I'm hosting this week's Sunday Stamps Challenge

Good morning Stampers!  Welcome back to another fabulous Sunday! I'm hosting a color challenge at Sunday Stamps this week and I hope you can play along with us.

I came across this cool technique called Traced Doodling from Splitcoast Stampers, and I wanted to try to try out. You can find the instructions here. It such a cool technique and I think it looks great with the Wildflower Meadow background stamp.  Can you tell I love this stamp!

I inked up the Wildflower Meadow stamp with our white craft ink pad, and once it is stamped onto Sahara Sand, it creates a nice subtle background. Sahara Sand is such a nice light color. I used our Watercolor Pencils to trace around the image (very slowly).  Can't believe they are being retired as well! I haven't tried this technique with our markers yet, but I'm sure it will also work. I once again used our Banner Greetings hostess stamp set for my sentiment.  Told 'ya I would be using this set a lot, lol. 

Hope you have a great Sunday.  If you're browsing through the new Annual Catalog, what will you be ordering first?

Thanks for stopping by today, until next time!

Good for you...

Welcome back Stampers!  Happy hump day Wednesday! I have a fun new card creation to share with you today.  I combined two blog challenges to create this card.  I used the soon to be retired Perfectly Preserved stamp set with the coordinating Cannery Set Framelits Dies. Such a fun set and I can't believe I haven't used it more often.  Even though it will be retired, I will keep this stamp set and matching Framelits Dies in my favorites collection.

There's a lot going on with this card but I love the way it came out. The base of the card is Old Olive, layered with Real Red card stock and the DSP is from Summer Smooches.  I punched out the corners with the scallop trim border and decorated it with Old Olive 1/8" Taffeta Ribbon then used the 3/16" Old Olive Brights Brads. The Banner Greetings stamped in Old Olive looks great against the Night of Navy card stock. I used the Night of Navy DSP for the jar lid. 

You can check out the creations for the Hand Stamped Sentiments here and the Nacho Average Challenges here.  Between the both blogs, there is so much inspiration.  

So last night I started watching the new season of Extreme Weight Loss and the it was so inspirational and emotional. It's amazing how much weight the participants lost in one year, all from exercise and eating better and right.  Wow, to see the transformations was amazing! Going to dust off my Zumba discs and my Wii and get back to exercising again. At least start off by exercising once a week and slowly adding more days. 

Thanks so much for stopping by today.  Hope you have a great day! Until next time. 

More Sneak Peeks...

Hello Stampers.  Happy Monday. If you have the day off today for Memorial Day, hope you are having a great Monday. I spent part of the weekend working on some swaps for my sideline group.  We were to use new stamp sets from the upcoming 2013-2014 Annual Catalog so I have some sneak peeks for you today.

For the first card, I used a new background stamp set called Wildflower Meadow, which is gorgeous!  And it coordinates with an embossing folder also called Wildflower Meadow. Such a great combination! I didn't use the entire background, just part of it.  Can you see the embossed part of the card? Isn't cool! So many possibilities with this combo.

My color combo for this card was Melon Mambo, Pumpkin Pie, Daffodil Delight, Whisper White and Basic Black. I layered the Melon Mambo with the Pumpkin Pie Polka Dot DSP. I also used a new Hostess stamp set called Banner Greetings. I know it will get used a lot. The sentiment reads "Thankful for you". A little bling on the flowers adds a nice touch.

This card is very different from the other one, but I love the simplicity of it. I wanted the banners to be the focus of the card. I paired Banner Greetings with the Hearts of Flutter banner stamp set. So happy this stamp set is still in the new catalog! I used the similar color combo from the card above, except I added Pacific Point.

Two different cards using similar color combo with new stamp sets. Did I tell you the new Annual Catalog goes live next Friday, May 31st at Noon (MT). I can't wait! Thanks so much for stopping by. Until next time.

Button Buddies & Banner Greetings

Hello Stampers!  Happy Sunday Tuesday.  Well Stampers, my apologies for the delayed post, another weekend without internet access.  But I must say that with everything going on right now in our city, our state, our nation, not having internet access is the least of my worries.

We have a fun color challenge this week at Sunday Stamps and Hayley is our hostess.  A bright and cheerful color combo. Make sure you check out the creations from my fellow designers and of course we hope you have a chance to play along with us.

I love using the Button Buddies stamp set and can't believe it will already be retired. I especially love using our designer buttons with it  But I can tell you that the new redesigned buttons coming up in the new annual catalog are beautiful.  I did use a new hostess stamp set, Banner Greetings-which I love!  I know I'll be using it a lot.  Hard to tell in the photo but the sentiment reads "Thankful for you". 

Thanks for stopping by.  Hope your week is great.  Until next time.