Feeling Blue

Well, I'm not really feeling blue, but I am feeling in the mood for blue. Light blue, dark blue, blue-green, greenish-blue, any blue!  I saw a similar color combo on Pinterest and I just had to change it to Stampin' Up! colors!

 I'm not sure if it reminds me of the beach at dusk or a mountain lake in the morning, but it calms me.  Do you have colors that do that for you?  So, anyway, I decided to make a couple cards with this color scheme and I used some new techniques that add a little bit extra to a kind of plain card.  The first one uses a technique I saw on Stampin' Up!'s website.  You can see it here. Angie, a concept artist at Stampin' Up! used the new firm foam stamp pads and dragged them across the paper which gave it a sort of watercolor look to it.  Now, I have some of the new firm foam pads, but not all, and it definitely makes a difference!  Can you tell which ones were the old linen pads? Yep, Night of Navy and Soft Sky!  That's ok, it still came out pretty well.  The new pads have a smoother feel to them so they seem to smear better.

I used the new Chalk Talk stamp set in Basic Gray and colored the Whisper White taffeta ribbon with a Pool Party marker--easy way if you don't have all the ribbon colors you want!!!  I really like the graphic look to this card, what a great technique.
The second card used the same stamp set, along with the Chalk Talk framelits set that comes in the Chalk Talk bundle (you save 15% if you buy them together).  It's a smaller card (3 1/2 x 5) so the small tag takes up most of the front, then I just added little pennants at the end (got that idea from this card by Shannon Jaramillo).  On the tag, I used a technique I learned at Salt Lake Regional convention in April and was demonstrated by Jane Lee (very talented Stampin' Up! Artisan team member/new stampin' friend).  Jane used the stamp pad and wiped it across the embossed cardstock so that the raised part got inked and the debossed part didn't (makes perfect sense, right??) I ran my die cut Pool Party tag through the Big Shot with the chevron embossing folder and then inked it with Night of Navy.  Again, I think it would've turned out better had I used the new ink pad, but it did the job.  I finished it off with some Whisper White taffeta ribbon and the white heat embossed stamp (from Chalk Talk) on the top and inked the edges of the card with Night of Navy.

If you follow me on Instagram (you do follow me, right?) you saw the photo of my car thermometer--now, you know that the official temp (109º) is taken in the shade at the airport, so the car was reading the ambient temperature with me standing in the sun on the blacktop,  and it was scorching hot!!!

I had to sit and wait for my steering wheel to cool down before I could actually drive!  I hope it's not nearly this hot where you are, but if so, please stay cool and hydrated!  School's out, summer is here and I'm going to start counting down the days until Convention!!  Yay!

Julie