The Blossom Challenge Goes Sentimental

 

Hello Friends and Welcome to the August edition of the The Blossom Challenge.  I’m Christine bringing you this month’s The Blossom Challenge, and we’re Going Sentimental, focussing on Power Poppy’s beautiful selection of sentiments.  

Today I’m bringing you two inspiration cards with Sentiments as the focus.  

First up is a design I made for a recent wedding.  

For a lot of years my husband and I were youth pastors and it’s been fun to see our former students get married over the years.  This wedding was a delightful one with the bride from Indian-Canadian descent and the groom from British-Canadian descent, the mix of cultures and colours at the wedding was gorgeous.  This palette reflects the colours in the wedding of orange, pink, coral and red.  I’ve utilized two beautiful Power Poppy sets,  Hummingbird Paradise as the beautiful floral frame, and then one of my ALL TIME favourite polymer sets from Power Poppy Big Scripts.  Did you know that this set features hand drawn sentiments by Marcy?  I just love her scripty writing.  

To highlight the sentiment I embossed it on white cardstock, then sponged warm shades of Distress Oxide Ink, Seedless Preserves and Abandoned Coral around it, wiping the ink off the sentiment once it was done.  The floral frame is fussy cut out in a windowed design.  

Next up is a Clean and Simple design.  

Dear friends of ours move away today to another city in the province.  We are going to miss them terribly.  Over the years we’ve watched them grow from a newly married couple to a family of four.  We’ve shared a love of creativity and the mountains, so this design is a bit of a nod to our friendship, and the fact that they are moving closer to the Rockies.  Similar to the first card, I created a background of a sunset sky using Distres Oxide Inks: Tumbled Glass, Wilted Violet, Abandoned Coral and Seedless Preserves, spashed some water on the background, then embossed this awsome encouraging sentiment from Power Poppy M-Powering Words (currently sold out in polymer) onto the beautiful colour of the background.  I used a framed arch die to accent the sentiment, and then hand drew in a silhouette of our favourite mountain range in Canmore, Alberta, the Three Sisters, filling it in with a black Sharpie, and added a punch-cut sparkly paper moon.  

Now how about some phenomenal Sentimental inspiration from The Bloom Brigade?  

Barbara

Essie

Gloria

Lisa

and Me, Christine!

Now it’s your turn Power Poppy friends!  Your challenge this month is to create something “Sentimental”  where the focus is on the sentiment.  We’re inviting you to think about creative backgrounds, stencilling, framing the sentiment with other sets, or creative uses of patterned paper and dies.  You can use any Power Poppy set as part of your design to be in the running for our monthly prize!  

To sweeten the deal Marcy has discounted a number of her Fall themed Sentiment sets (and a few extras) for you HERE.  Did you know there are also two sets in the sentimental family that are FREE?!  I Can Do All Things and Let It Be.  We’re making it easy for you to play along!  

Add your link at the bottom of the post for your chance to win a $20 Gift Code to the Power Poppy Store!

Would you like to know who last month’s The Blossom Challenge: Christmas In July winner is?    Random.org picked Amanda!  Congratulations Amanda!   Please email Marcy at bloom@powerpoppy.com to collect your gift code!  

Looking forward to seeeing all of your Sentimental Creations!

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

Creative Confetti: Flowers for the Front Line

Hello to all you cardmakers, it's Barb here as your host today. Whether you are at home self quarantining or still working. We are all doing our part during this crisis. There is a lot of grief and uncertainty but there is goodness too in the world. That goodness will keep us together!  As a retired ER nurse, my thoughts are with all of the doctors, nurses, and first responders who are on the frontlines taking care of the sick with courage and resolve.  They are the Heros. That's why for today's challenge, I chose to make these front line workers the center of our challenge! 

HOW TO PLAY: Simply make a card with flowers on the front and a sentiment that shows how you feel about our Frontline.  It should be a thank you or an encouragement. I will urge you to not only make a card but to send it off to your local Emergency Room Staff.  I will be mailing mine to my friends that are working long hours to help. Let's spread some goodness and make them feel valued and appreciated. 

On to my Creation!

I used a digital stamp called Hummingbird Paradise. It comes with or without a hummingbird. I placed a sentiment in the middle from two different digital sets. One is Flower Bomb and the other is Acorn Ornament. They fit nicely in the middle. I printed it out with my laserjet printer which enabled me to use heat foil the sentiment. The rest was colored with my Copic markers.

Here you can see the foiled sentiment  

And now, Let's see you make Flowers for the Frontline! Share your creations by linking them up below using the linky below. Every single entry will be in the running for a $25 gift card to the Power Poppy Shop!

Please stay safe and well, until next time!

Barbara

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

Enchanted Garden Day 5: Floribunda

Last day of previews - and it’s a stamp set that I hope you will love and cherish. I hope you’ve been enchanted by the peeks we’ve shared this week, I sure have loved presenting them to you and giving you a peek into my thought process.

Is it fair to say that we’ve saved the best for last? 

Meet Floribunda, an exciting stamp set measuring in at a generous 6" x 8" — such a big canvas means I could fill it with as many pretty things as I could! The focal point is, of course, a spectacular floral border fitting perfectly into an A2 card front. 

When concocting the participants in this ultimate floral border, I considered first and foremostly the flowers that a hummingbird would enjoy. Why, you ask? Because this set ALSO comes with a little hummingbird, which you can pop right into the center of the border OR use on its own with any of our other botanical stamps.

Introducing Floribunda

Designed with essential hummingbird favorites such as Fuchsia, Honeysuckle, Lupine, and Morning Glories, plus a plump Dahlia and pops of Primrose — there is NO LIMIT to the ways this beauty can be colored, cropped, and bedazzled.

What else is so exciting about this stamp set? The array of large, expressive sentiments that fit into the center space. You’ll find yourself using them in card after card — and these are sentiments you will not find anywhere else. Have you ever seen a stamp quoting British statesman, former Prime Minister, author, and scholar Benjamin Disraeli? I’m thinking no. Girl, I will go there! I once handpainted his words, “Nurture your mind with great thoughts” around the walls of my apartment kitchen. (Here is a peek at that, when it was featured in Mary Engelbreit’s Home Companion magazine.)

I love the idea of bathing our minds in wonderful words. Filling ourselves with positive messages. Reading, absorbing, continuing our curiosity, learning other viewpoints, taking it alllllll in. But I digress.

I also love coloring flowers — and boy, does Floribunda deliver in that department. I had an enjoyable afternoon, evening, and then morning coloring this up with my Prismacolor pencils. I created a Naples Yellow background using watered-down Winsor Newton gouache paint. Then stamped that awesome sentiment smack dab in the middle (using that trusty mini MISTI, my go-to stamping tool).

Does this image look familiar to you? Well, you eagle-eyed thing, this image was released recently as a digital stamp, and you can find it here right this very moment to download and get to coloring: Hummingbird Paradise. The clear version has a whole array of sentiments that do not come with the digi. 

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OK.... Are you ready for some SERIOUS eye candy?

Allison Cope

Stacy Morgan

Christine Okken

Kathy Jones

Leslie Miller

Barbara Walker

I hope you have loved, loved, loved this week’s “show”! And if you think that we’re finished, well, come back tomorrow on RELEASE DAY for a full-scale blog hop with the Ellen Hutson TEAM. Yesssssss — there is going to be so much creativity happening on Monday, we might just break the internet. 

LOVE YOU!