On the sunny side of the street

OH, HI! 

So happy to welcome you all back to day two of our August “all clear stamp” release, which goes on sale this Friday. All week long we’ll be sharing tantalizing glimpses into these five sets — each one designed to help us share our sunshine with others!

Today I’m not going to beat around the bush. If you are a lover of sunflowers and the rustic, rich, cozy colors of autumn, then the cards created with the set de jour are going to wow you.

I designed the images for Sunny Harvest to celebrate some of the gorgeous glow that comes from the late summer garden. By the end of the season, sunflowers have gone wild, practically dripping over the tall fences of our neighborhoods, filling the flower buckets of many farmers markets, and if not grown by the locals, then gosh darnit, we might pick up a bunch of them at the grocery store on our way out, because they will look so festive and warm in a big pitcher on the kitchen table.

The bouquet shown here, jammed tight with zinnias, flowering basil and dill, hot pink celosia...and a bunch of other stuff, is one I nabbed from our local farmers market. /// See my post from yesterday if you want the full geeked-out tribute to the market, plus the introduction of the sweet stamp set that goes along with it. /// After I took this photo, a honeybee—!!!!!!—buzzed over to one of the giant yellow sunflowers, and that little dude hung out, collecting pollen and doing his thing, on the face of the sunflower the entire walk home. Several blocks he hung with us, and continued his stay until we got home and made his way into my garden to see what else he could pollinate. That's some stick-to-it-iveness. (How the heck do you spell that made-up word?) Anyway, I thought it was neat.

You’ll find more than sunflowers in the Sunny Harvest set. Oh yes. This set features one of my very favorite plants to admire, Chinese Lantern (Physalis alkekengi). It grows like mad over at my mom and stepdad’s garden (I will share some pix with you this month, you’ll drool) and goes through the coolest transformation from flower to seed pod. When Chinese Lantern is blooming in full orange splendor, you need to pick a whole bunch of stalks, as you will definitely want to have them around to decorate your house for fall. If you let them dry (which I find is quite easy to do if you forget to add water to the vase over a course of months), the lanterns hold a lovely subdued shade of orange, and will last for EVERRRRR. For this set, I’ve paired them with the particularly fun POP of red-orange-yellow bittersweet berries on the vine.

There are combinations of all three of these plants in this set, and lots of sunny possibilities. The sentiments I’ve included are sure to warm up anybody’s mood.

It’s not as fun to hear about all this good stuff as it is to SEE it — and it’s EXTRASUPER fun to see it when designed and illustrated by the Bloom Brigade. Let’s go see what they’ve made... RIGHT NOW:

Allison Cope
Christine Okken
Cindy Lawrence
Danielle Kennedy
Dawn Burnworth
Julie Koerber
Kathy Jones
Leslie Miller
Stacy Morgan
Tosha Leyendekker

See ya tomorrow..... (won’t you please stop back by?)