Share Your Sunshine with five new clear stamps!

Well folks, this week has been a real RUSH! So much excitement building each day, as the Bloom Brigade helped us showcase the five Share Your Sunshine stamp sets with such colorful, inspiring cards! They give us their ALL on these cards and blog posts, and I want to give a giant shout out of THANKS to each of them!!

And thank you to ALL OF YOU for your enthusiastic comments you’ve left on our designers’ blogs, and shared with us here at Power Poppy. It means the world to know you enjoy what we are doing! What more, we hope to see what YOU will do with these new stamp sets, which were inspired, as always, by the joys and beauty of everyday life.

ALL of these sets are available to purchase today in the Power Poppy Shop. Before you go, I hope you’ll go see ONE LAST ROUND of cards created with these new clear stamp sets!

Take it away, BLOOMIES!!


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

Have a wonderful day, everybody!

Geraniums: Take Two!

Well, it appears that I just could not get enough when it comes to Geraniums!

The image I introduced in July in digital form is now available in snappily crisp, clear polymer, and now she has a friend! In Geraniums Take Two, the new potted Geranium (Pelargonium is the botanical name on these babies) was inspired by the mature plants that bloom and grow and reach for the sun in a lovely tangle of ruffles and color.

 

You'll find different sentiments in this clear polymer set—7 in all—that are all about spreading love and happiness with others. 

I hope you’ll take a gander at some of the possibilities with Geraniums Take Two, created by our gorgeous Bloom Brigade team:

Christine Okken
Cindy Lawrence
Danielle Kennedy
Julie Koerber
Kathy Jones
Leslie Miller
Stacy Morgan

Thanks so much, and hope you’ve been enjoying this week as much as we have! See you tomorrow, when EVERYTHING will be available to purchase at powerpoppy.com!

More to love from the countryside

Hello, it’s good to see you yet again. Feeling bright eyed, bushy tailed, and ready to soak up the sneaky peeks for our August release this Friday, I hope! And we aren’t even close to wrapping up for the week, because that’s how much good stuff is blooming. With the fabulous mild weather we’ve been having of late, I can tell you, things are spreading like WILDFLOWERS! Oh, wait. Is the phrase spreading like wildfire? Hm. Let’s just go with it!

Now, last month I released a set here at Power Poppy called Countryside Bouquet. You all understand that I do so love that nature. Love. It. Right before creating the images for last month’s release, I’d spent a lot of time outside: in private gardens, large public gardens, in wildflower preserves, and even a weekend with one of my dearest old friends at her family’s place at the lake, which is surrounded by woods, paths, and native wildflowers.

 

Here am I at the lake with my little Lulu, who, at 11 years old, is nearly as tall as I am. (I guess that’s not the craziest thing in the world, seeing as how I stand at a towering five feet. :)  We got a big kick out of walking miles at dusk, and between spotting turtles and a spotted fawn, I was taking in every wildflower that passed my eyeballs! May apple, jack-in-the-pulpit, phlox. Viva la countryside!

 

Ok, back to my stamp set. When conjuring the Countryside Bouquet that I first offered as a digital image, I only grew one of the plants in my garden, Hummingbird Sage, or Salvia (the tall spikey one in the back of the bouquet image). The other flowers: Cosmos and California Poppies, aren’t in my postage-stamp, sun-starved garden. So, when it came time to draw this image, I plucked a few posies that were blooming, and plunked them in a vase next to me, just to get myself in the groove. My menagerie included another Salvia variety, Windflower (Anemone canadensis) and a magenta-colored Clematis — I’m not sure which one this is, because it was mislabeled when I bought it several years ago.

Seeing these single sprigs of several plants got me thinking. “What if I drew just one stem of each of these flowers? Wonder if my crafty friends would like them?” And after seeing the popularity of the Countryside Bouquet set—truly, you all have IMPRESSED THE SOCKS OFF OF ME with your creations that I’ve seen—I thought it would be fun to create a “deluxe” version of this set, and introduce it in clear photopolymer. Only this time, it would have the single sprigs of each of the components of the bouquet!! This way, you can mix, match, mingle, and mangle the flowers to your heart’s content. PLUS, I’ve added a bunch of single word sentiments (well, one has two words, if you must know) that are just fun and fanciful.

Presenting: Countryside Bouquet Deluxe! 

This set affords you the ability to create impressive cards with the intricate and showy wildflower bouquet — OR — and this is an important OR: Simple cards with a single stem or a single word! Simplicity!! Did you ever think you’d hear the word simplicity come out of my mouth? (It doesn’t often, just so you know). Countryside Bouquet Deluxe is so deluxe, it's actually simple.

 

Wouldn’t you like to see a few of the ways this set has been used, by some of the most creative and crafty gals I know? 

Take it away, BLOOM BRIGADE!

Allison Cope
Christine Okken
Cindy Lawrence
Julie Koerber
Stacy Morgan
Tosha Leyendekker

Thanks for coming by and listening to my ramblings! I hope you’ll give this set a try. I know there are soooo many things you can do with it!

Now in polymer: Glads and Gerberas!

Hello, all!

For those of you who’ve wondered, it’s time for our much-loved Gladioli and Gerbera Daisies images to make their debut in polymer!

Dynamic Duos: Glads and Gerberas includes six upbeat sentiments that help you tell a friend you’re glad she or he is in your life. Cheer on their accomplishments! Just share a little love. And do it accompanied by some of our most popular flower images, which I have heard are pretty fun to color up from a few reliable sources!

For those of you who haven’t seen the possibilities with these fab flowers, I suggest you stop by our Pinterest boards (and follow them!) for each flower: Gladioli is here, and Gerbera Daisies live right here!

Now that these images will be available in clear photopolymer (August 1st, this Friday!) we’ve got a few more spectacular samples to tempt your senses! Thank you to the Bloom Brigade for making such special cards to celebrate this Dynamic Duo. Let the tour begin!

Allison Cope
Christine Okken
Julie Koerber
Katie Sims
Tosha Leyendekker

Thank you for coming by today, and please do pop back over on Wednesday, if you wanna see even MORE from our upcoming Share Your Sunshine August Release!

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?)

Farmers Market - a clear stamp set filled with goodness

Well hello there!

Today I am just giddy to tell you about our upcoming release, which drops August 1st. And not only is this new collection presented as clear photopolymer sets, but it consists of FIVE sets in all. Our biggest stamp release yet! For those of you who’ve been loving our flower-filled digital stamps from the past few months, there *might* be some familiar images—paired with a few surprises. OK, that’s pretty cryptic. Hope it’s enough of a tease to see you back at the Power Poppy Blog EVERY DAY THIS WEEK! The Bloom Brigade is creating up a storm to help us show off all the juicy jubilance! You’re going to want to see every day of the fun unfurl, I can just tell.

Our first set peek celebrates abundance, freshness, saturated color, a sense of community, and unlimited possibilities. It’s all about the Farmers Market!

I find something special—and sometimes overwhelming—about the visiting the market (and we have several amaaaaaazing ones here in St. Louis, including Soulard Market, one of the oldest and largest farmers markets west of the Mississippi River). Whether it’s a Saturday morning extravaganza with live music and hot coffee and bushel baskets everywhere you turn (like Tower Grove Farmers Market), or a late-afternoon affair, with vendors displaying everything from fresh herbs, local honey, and native wildflowers to grass-fed beef and gorgeous fresh eggs from free-range chickens (Schlafly and Webster Groves are two favorites) — I invariably come home with WAY. TOO. MUCH.



We hob-nob or be-bop or shimmy from stand to stand (no one sulks at a farmers market) and there’s a shoulder-to-shoulder coziness and sense of community. “We all get to be here surrounded by the earth’s bounty and tempted by fresh-grown goodness—can I get an amen?!” we say to one another without speaking. Folks standing in line to pick out the perfectly ripe heirloom tomato or the latest variety of colorful cauliflower—did you know it comes in orange and purple and bright chartreuse, along with beloved white? Comparing and contrasting the hot peppers, caressing the curly kale. Trying to gauge whether your family can finish off a peck of peaches before next week’s market day arrives. Let me tell you right now, if you’re thinking about buying peaches grown ’round these parts, just go ahead and get the bushel. 

 

OK, so I probably went on too long about the market. But I hope you feel a bit of the enthusiasm that went into the creation of this new set for you. Introducing: Farmers Market!

This fresh set of TEN clear stamps will be available to purchase on Friday, August 1, along with the other four sets in Power Poppy’s August “Share Your Sunshine” collection.

Annnnnnnd now it’s time for an abundant display of creative card inspiration from the Bloom Brigade!!! (“We all get to be here surrounded by these artists’ talents and tempted by their expertly crafted treasures while we sit in our PAJAMAS!—can I get an amen?!” we say to one another across the internet....)

GO BLOOM BRIGADE, GO!

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

Hope to see you back here, tomorrow, friends!