Be Strong, Be Happy, Be You

Hi and happy Sunday,

I hope you are all doing well. The weather is the thing here in California, up and down the state. It's hot and humid here on the southern coast, hot and smoky every place else with the horrible fires. I spoke with my mom, who lives in the far northern part of the state, and while there are no fires in her immediate area, she said that the air quality is bad and when she got up Saturday morning, there were ashes covering everything outside.

Our good friends that live in the Central Coast wine region decided to leave their house there for their house here because of the smoke and very poor air. 

So, I hope all is much nicer where you live.

I spent most of yesterday re-orging dies that don't go with stamp sets. I'm not quite finished, but I think I'm going to like the end result. 

Since I didn't do any actual stamping yesterday, I am today. I've got a couple of cards to share with you. One uses this week's Freshly Made Sketches layout along with the colors from the As You See It Challenge, and the second uses the CAS(E) This Sketch layout from a few week's ago.

The Freshly Made Sketch is certainly interesting. I do have triangle dies, but I thought I'd play around with other shapes and images placed in the general layout of the sketch. Here's what I came up with.

This stamp set is an older one from Stampin' Up called Rooted In Nature. The tree is stamped on water color paper using Distress ink cubes in rust, yellow and brown. After inking the stamp, I spritzed it with water then stamped it on the paper. The leaf image is stamped in the same way using rust Distress ink. Both images are cut with the set dies. The greeting is stamped using Bermuda Bay ink and each line is cut out and glued with liquid glue.

Here is the inside of this card.

For the second card, I used two new Concord & 9th sets. The background is made with the Painted Turnabout set and the greeting is from the new "freebie" set called  Lots of Thoughts.

The inks are Gina K ink cubes in various blue shades and a dark red shade. The greeting circle stamp is layered onto a Die-namics double stitched circle die.

Here's the inside of this card.

Thanks for stopping by and have a great work week,

Colleen

Supplies

Stamps: Rooted in Nature by Stampin' Up, Painted Turnabout set, Hey Bestie set and Lots Of Thoughts set all by Concord & 9th

Paper: Card 1: SU thick and regular Whisper White, Crushed Curry, Cajun Craze and Bermuda Bay card stocks Card 2: Gina K card stocks

Ink: Tim Holtz Distress ink cubes, SU Bermuda Bay, Gina K ink cubes

Other: SU Rooted In Nature dies, Lil' Inker square stitched die, Misti, Gemini Jr, Hero A2 rounded corner dies, Spellbinder and Die-namics circle dies, SU Candy Dots, Dimensionals, Gina K Connect glue