What is one of the pieces of life's puzzle that we cherish so much, through all our years? It's friendship, isn't it! We start making friends at an early age, often with siblings or cousins and move on to school mates and neighbors. We have friends that last our whole life and friends that we met just a few days ago but feel like we have known them for much longer. I think God gave us friends and made us to crave friendship as a way to enjoy life, journey through both the joys and sorrows of our days and help us focus on others rather than ourselves. There's much more to it but I imagine you can join me in cherishing the friends in your life.
Today's stamp set that I'm featuring is called "Beautiful Friendship" and it has some lovely sentiments with great fonts as well as some beautiful flower and leaf stamps that are the "Distinktive" style of stamp which create a layered look to the ink. This gives a depth and texture to your stamping that is a result of the way the stamp is carved and not because of any special technique that you had to learn or master. I really liked this stamp set because of the flower that looks like a hydrangea. That was one of my grandmother's favorite flowers and every spring I love seeing the blue and purple hydrangeas that remind me of her. The rose stamp is also so pretty.
Here are some ideas playing with this fun stamp set!
I've learned that one of my customers' favorite colors is purple - in all its shades! I decided to use our three shades of purple for this card. I began with our new background stamp, "All Wired Up" which is a chicken wire motif. I did have to stamp off the ink on my grid paper first as it was too dark with my first attempt at this card. I then used Highland Heather for the flowers, Mossy Meadow for the leaves, Purple Posy for the sprig stamp and Gorgeous Grape for my sentiment. All of these purple shades compliment each other and don't fight for color tone. Since I chose to make this card with Very Vanilla instead of Whisper White, I needed to "darken" up the white part of my gingham check paper (retired from the recent Occasions catalog). I used a sponge brayer and applied some Crumb Cake ink lightly to make the start white more off white. That's a great trick when you don't want your design to feature white.
This card features the hydrangea stamp that caught my eye. I stamped it three times with Purple Posy, Seaside Spray and Rococo Rose inks. In keeping with the lighter color palate, I chose Soft Sea Foam as my green color. For something a little different, I embossed the card base to give it some texture.
I'm sure the "Floral Essence" paper has caught your eye already! It's gorgeous Designer Series Paper that features gorgeous florals with an impressionistic style like Monet or Renoir. I used some of that as my background and then stamped up this great card using Crushed Curry, Mossy Meadow and Rococo Rose. It's really a pretty color scheme and the sentiment is perfect.
Here's a look at the stamp set so you can see it in its entirety:
And here are some ideas from the Stampin'Up! artists to inspire you:
Again, I've put my supply list at the bottom of this post so you can easily order any of the products I used to create these cards. It's fun to embellish, die cut, watercolor, etc but it's also fun to just stamp and this stamp set is perfectly suited to that. I hope you'll consider adding it to your stash.
I'm off to some classes today! It's a chance to share what I love and celebrate the friendships I have with so many of you. Thanks for stopping by and taking a peek at my work! I truly appreciate your interest! Leave me a comment and let me know how I'm doing!
Happy Stampin'!
Sarah
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