Emerging eye candy

On spring mornings, I can hardly wait to hop out of bed, make coffee, and run outside to see what new plants have started to emerge in my garden. It’s like Christmas for me, all the little gifts of nature. I get a little tingle at the sight of each of them, from the earliest crocuses pushing through the crumbly leaves (I’m so bad at raking those up in the fall) and plump, fuzzy buds on bare magnolia branches, to the expanding colonies of self-seeding hellebores and Virginia bluebells. It fills me with gratitude. Hey, I feel an inspiring quote coming on...

What a delight it is


When, of a morning

I get up and go out


To find in full bloom a flower 

That yesterday was not there.

Tachibana Akemi

Sometimes the flowers and leaves are unfurling at such a fast pace (like, say, today, when the temps made it to the high 60s in St. Louis), you can miss them all together! In the past week since launching Power Poppy, I’ve been caught up wrapping and mailing out parcels packed with stamp sets (YAY!!! Thank you, folks!!!) and trying to keep up with everything at the kids’ school, and all the soccer and baseball and softball practices, plus other exciting graphic design projects in the works, and there’s this vintage motorcycle event that my darling Doug and I put on... I have to confess, I plum forgot to go out garden gawking. This afternoon I went out there, and saw that I’d missed all manner of emerging flowers and leaves. Wait, I feel another quote coming on...

Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. 

from John Hughes’ Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

I’m going to make a point to get out there and feed my soul some glorious gifts of nature in the morning. I’m setting that alarm extra early!

Speaking of missing things, I haven’t kept y’all posted on what’s happening in the Power Poppy online community. 

We would L-O-V-E to see you over on Pinterest, as we have juicy new boards, loaded up with the entire April collection and tons of eye-poppingly beautiful Bloom Brigade creations. GO HERE to peep Power Poppy on Pinterest! We’ll be adding much more over the next several weeks, with challenges and inspiration galore.

ALSO: Power Poppy is on Splitcoast! We want to be sure we don’t miss a single project you post—so please tag any cards you upload with powerpoppy (one word!) and we’ll all get to gawk at what you’ve been up to with our stamp designs. One more opportunity for us to feel like it’s Christmas morning... delighting in the gifts of the stamping community, seeing creativity unfurling before our eyes.

Let’s do this! And thank you again, from the bottom of my heart, for the lovely emails and notes and comments of encouragement you all have sent. (And thank you for following up by ordering my stamp designs!!!) I am so humbled. I feel very, very lucky to get to do what I love, and then to share it with you all is really something cool.