Hello Friends!
I hope you’re all surviving our heatwave the last few days! Whew it’s been HOT and it’s not even August yet! It is approaching rather quickly though, and that means YAY! You can soon order the new products from the holiday mini catalog, otherwise known as the August-December, 2020 Mini Catalog. So many fun sets in that catalog, and the paper… yes, you know I have a thing for pretty paper… it’s gorgeous! A little bit of Christmas in July! Maybe thinking about Christmas will make it seem cooler outside?
When I’m looking at my stamp sets trying to decide what to put on my blog for y’all, it’s like eenie-meenie-miney-mo! I have so much from the 20-21 Annual Catalog which still feels new to me (it’s only been out for 3 months), and products which I haven’t even used yet. And now I have a large assortment of new products from the holiday catalog… oh my! What a dilemma to be in right???
Given that it is still July and I still have birthdays coming up, today I opted to go with products from the annual catalog that I haven’t played with yet! I selected the Artistry Blooms Suite of products.
I’ve seen lots of beautiful cards on Pinterest featuring these products but I wanted something completely unique. Mostly what I’ve seen featured is the Banner Blooms Dies which are so gorgeous! But the stamp set, Hand-Drawn Blooms, is gorgeous as well and I wanted to incorporate the two together. I’ll admit that I struggled with this card a little bit. I tried several different things and hmmm…. nope, it just wasn’t coming together the way I wanted.
I wanted to carry a watercolor look throughout my design and used watercolor pencils and blender pens for the stamped image, cropped it down with the largest scalloped circle from Layering Circles Dies. I had also cut the Banner Blooms large die out of Whisper White CS. Somewhere in my brain last night, I could see the stamped image peeking out from under the large flower/banner die, but it looked better in my brain than it did on my card! I wanted to “marry” those two and make them work on the same card. I almost scrapped the whole thing altogether. I’d gotten a late start and finally decided to just go to bed and see if I could make it work in the morning!
Well, sometimes that’s all it takes. This morning when I awoke, I took another look at what I had going on and it was very clear what it needed… scissors and custom watercolor paper!
With all abandon aside, I proceeded to cut my die-cuts into smaller pieces and let them complement each other rather than compete with each other. Continue reading “If At First You Don’t Succeed, Cut Up Your Die-cuts!”