Foraging for flowers, fruit, and fun

Good day to you! Thanks for stopping by during our release week previews for June’s Cultivate Love Collection. I so hope you’ve been soaking up the sneak peaks and marvelous cards from the Bloom Brigade. Those ladies show off my work with such diverse talent and skill, beauty, creativity, and loving words—it’s a celebration every day of the release and I appreciate each of them SO VERY MUCH! (Where’s that little heart-shaped emoji thingamabob when you need it?!) So far we’ve shared a burst of bold beauty from tissue-papery Poppies, and the sweet country charm of an herb garden in Sage Advice.

Today we’re showcasing a stamp set that celebrates the simple beauty of flowers and foraged finds arranged in different vessels. This set has a little of everything: wildflowers, roses, herbs, berries on the vine, and, well, let’s just take a look behind the images, back to the seed of inspiration.

Many of you know by now: I crave the energy and ideas available to all of us from the natural world. Sometimes, that means dropping everything to run outside to soak up my surroundings and then conjure arrangements, vignettes, and scenes for you to stamp (or in some cases, print out) and color. We’ve talked about how soothing and joyful that experience can be — for me as an artist, and I hope for YOU as an artist!

Of course, admiring flora and fauna outdoors is one thing. But what about when you snip a few sprigs and bring them indoors to enjoy? And what if you place the foraged goodies into quirky containers? Above, the kitchen windowsill was the perfect perch for a sunflower the kids grew from seed, plunked into a vintage Gemco vinegar bottle. (By the way, even the stopper/top of that bottle is pretty cool, it’s bright green! I had it cozied up to the base of the bottle so it wouldn’t feel left out.)

Snapped these fresh white, perfectly perfect daisies a few days ago at Shaw Nature Preserve. Fear not, I don’t ever pluck flowers from the wild or from other people’s gardens. But I do photograph them like a madwoman. I wonder if they see me coming at them like a nature paparazzi.

At the OK Hatchery Feed & Garden shop the other day, I couldn’t help but notice this jumbo glazed pot just overflowing with strawberries! Do the arching stems of strawberries remind you of a certain digital stamp set we introduced last year? Hmmm.....

Did you know that before blueberries are blue, they are gorgeously green? And on this specimen, they are chalky blue-green with rosy pink, purple, blue, chartreuse.... I mean, they are like the ultimate berries! Had no idea they could be this cool until I came upon this developing fruit during one of my jaunts. These blueberry bushes happen to live in the Kemper Center for Home Gardening at the Missouri Botanical Garden.

What do all of these random pix have to do with one another? Well, I’ve brought together snippets of nature’s fine offerings and arranged them in a birthday-and-friendship-sentiment set called Go Wild. Check it out:

Go Wild can be as wild or as tame as you want it to be! As a fan of the windowsill garden-snip gallery (that is, taking whatever breaks off when you’re outside weeding, the extra fronds from your pruning, or just to showcase a gorgeous bloom that might otherwise go unheralded), I have THREE unique images that will offer loads of cardmaking and coloring possibilities!

The main windowsill image has a mishmash of repurposed bottles (I can’t be the only one who has so many of these things I refuse to get rid of, as they make the perfect vessels!), and these bottles hold single rose, a cutting of scented geranium that’s already started to root (they DO start almost immediately, it’s fascinating!), a few Coreopsis (the beautifully nicknamed “tickseed”... can we see somebody about getting that name changed?), and finally, a stalk of bushy basil in flower.

Of course, we all know that YOU can make these foraged snippings into whatever the heck you want!

Another Go Wild image that you’ll see today in our designers’ feeds features blueberries (that we now know don’t HAVE to be blue!) with a mix of flowers in a Mason jar. The other day I saw a tea towel that was fancifully handlettered with the words: Everything’s cuter in a Mason jar. Amen to that! Bring on the cuteness, we can’t get enough. Ever. Never enough.

And lastly... if you were a fan of our Arranging Roses digital image, and have been hoping it would someday come out in clear, well, your wait is over! The roses and strawberries are ready to be inked up and stamped (well, they will be after June 8th), and this version has the tiny fallen petals as their own little stamps, so you can make a background or an accent, or whatever you fancy.

Paired with lots of sentiments for birthdays and friendship, you really can’t go wrong with this one!

OK, enough talking, and on to the Bloom Brigade’s parade of beauty and bounty!

Leslie Miller
Cindy Lawrence
Tosha Leyendekker
Kathy Jones
Allison Cope
Stacy Morgan
Katie Sims
Christine Okken
Julie Koerber

I know it seems crazy, but we still have TWO MORE SETS to reveal over the next two days. And I know tomorrow’s set is going to be an eye-opener, it’s different from anything else we have in the store... are you up for a wild ride that has nothing to do with wildflowers? :)