Hydrangeas and Bees

I'm joining in again with A Blog Named Hero's Challenge—Stretch Your Stamps. I decided to stretch my Daisy and Bugs Stamp and Cut set by using one of the little bees as a background for my purple Large Hydrangea Hero Arts stamp. 

I don't think I've used this bee before, I was always kind of focused on the daisy and the ladybug stamps in the set. They have matching dies, but since I used him as background paper, I didn't need to die cut him.

I looove Hydrangeas in real life and have two shrubs that pretty much just take care of themselves and give huge blooms each year. I colored this one purple, but mine are more pink, though they can get a little purple. It depends on the lime in your soil, but since I'm a lazy gardener who does more dreaming than pruning, I haven't really done anything to the soil.

I used Prismacolor pencils on the flower, with Stickles in the flower centers and on the bee wings, but it's hard to see at this angle. I also added Moonstone bling from Honeybee Stamps, which is totally appropriate for this post, doncha think? They have some great Nuvo products on sale btw. The inking on the panel and the card are Distress Inks in Squeezed Lemonade and Salty Ocean.

Hope you'll stretch your stamps and join me in this challenge, you have until September 10th.

Happy Friday!

Chark

Celebrating An Anniversary

Hard for me to believe, by my hubby and I have been married 27 years as of June 16th. That's crazy! Sure we were just 22 but still, I imagined when we'd celebrate 25 years and it seemed so far in the future. 

Is there anyone who isn't surprised some days by their age? I remember my mom and her brothers all sitting around our kitchen table, laughing and talking and they seemed like they were teenagers and their ages were 55-78. That kinda cracked me up as a teen myself.

Ah well, I guess the good news is that we're still here counting those years, am I right?! Here's the card I made for him for our anniversary. I used Lawn Fawn heart dies to cut out of maroon glitter paper, then backed it with text paper. The Forever die is an old one but here's a similar one from Echo Park and it's cut from blue foil cardstock. The last touch was black and gold washi tape to make it more masculine. I received a beautiful card myself, but didn't take a picture, but it did have glitter on it!

Oh, and today I'm up on the a2z Scrapbooking blog with a gift bag I made with the gorgeous Large Hydrangea stamp and a digi butterfly. Here's a peek. Head over and say Hi! if you get a chance.

Don't forget, if you fill your cart at a2z Scrapbooking with $25 or more in stuff, you can use Chark15 to get a 15% discount! 

Happy Weekend!

Chark

New Challenge

We have a brand-new challenge up at a2z Scrapbooking for June and I think it's going to be a fun one. Just use your Hero Arts products and create a shaped card. 

My card is up today on the blog and it's a boring shape...oval...but it was fun to make a bunch of ovals with the nesting infinity dies. The Hero Arts Infinity Dies are a great bargain for how many you get. They come in tags, hearts, teapots, ovals and circles and rectangles. 

If you look at the challenge post here, you'll see more creative cards that fit the theme of a shaped card. And I'm thinking my HA digis would be great for this challenge, so easy to size them to make a card or tag.

Here's a little sneak peek at my card.

Hope you have a fab weekend! I'm taking next week off just to spend some time with the fam, but I'll be back posting June 12, hope to see you then!

Happy Friday!

Chark

World Creativity & Innovation Day

Thank goodness for the interwebs, I learn so much, like today is World Creativity Day. Who even knew that was a thing? To celebrate, I made some cards. Okay, I was going to make cards anyway, but let's pretend I wasn't.

Here's another take with the Hero Arts Hydrangea stamp. You can also get the matching dies for this, but for this card, I just stamped on blue, heat embossed it in white and used a white prismacolor pencil to color it. Then I added some Diamond Stickles for some of the flower centers and some dots at the bottom of the card. You can't really see them, but I think the glitter adds a lot to the stamp. I know you're surprised that I prefer it with glitter:) 

I'm entering this guy in the A Blog Named Hero anything goes challenge here.

Here's another card, this one using a 2 Cute Ink digi stamp and some Dylusion sprays in green and blue on a card front die cut. 

The first World Creativity & Innovation Day took place in April 2002, and by 2005 it had extended to a week, starting on April 15, the birthday of Leonardo Da Vinci, and culminating in World Creativity and Innovation Day on April 21. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was a painter, architect, inventor, and student of all things scientific. His natural genius crossed so many disciplines that he epitomized the term “Renaissance man.” Today he remains best known for his art, including two paintings that remain among the world’s most famous and admired, Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. Art, da Vinci believed, was indisputably connected with science and nature.

Leonardo wasn't formally educated and he was an accomplished lyre player. He wrote backwards and left-handed to disguise his writing so others couldn't get in his business. He developed a wooden rolling machine gun that a man could sit inside and control and I got to sit in a replica in a museum once.

He studied river erosion and realized the earth was older than the Bible suggested. His parachute design was made and used in 2000 by a skydiver. He studied cadavers and replaced the tendons with strings to study how they worked. He was experimenting with painting on stone when he painted The Last Supper, but the experiment failed and few of his original brushstrokes remain, as it has been restored.

And he was, without a doubt, both creative and innovative and a great inspiration.

Happy Friday!

Chark

Hero Arts Large Hydrangea Lots of Ways

So, I recently got this Large Hydrangea stamp and I looove it! It's a wooden stamp, which is tricky for me—I'm not a great stamper and the clear stamps are easier to fix when they don't go well, but I had to have this. 

I love hydrangea flowers and have two shrubs which usually do beautifully for me. Which is impressive, because I am a terrible gardener. I wish I were better and I try every year, but unless you can thrive by yourself, you probably don't belong in my yard. 

I used this stamp for my posts over at a2z Scrapbooking here and here. 

And this is another incarnation of this stamp. This time, I embossed not in white but in gold and the paper is vellum instead of cardstock. I used my Prismacolor pencils to color, which is what I used on the red card. The purple hydrangea is done in Twinkling H2O watercolors.

I used shiny gold paper to cut an oval frame for this one, to match the embossing. I haven't made it into a card yet, but I want to! I don't often emboss on vellum, but it looks fab with this stamp.

Do you have any stamps that you use a ton? I think this one will be a favorite of mine. It's fun to color and so pretty.

If you're feeling you might need this stamp, you can hop over to the a2z Scrapbooking store and if you end up shopping more and get $25 or more in your cart, you can use my coupon code CHARK15 for 15% off your order just for reading my blog!

Happy Friday!

Chark