Stampin! with Jaydee

Hi Everyone.  Happy Monday.

Oh... .I had so much fun in my craft room today.  I spent several hours there just playing with stamps, ink and paper and loving every minute of it.

I also got to play along with a couple of challenges, so will have some cards to share with you this week.  The first one is a clean and simple watercolor card made using the Stampin' Up! Beautiful You set.   I REALLY love this set - and made 4 cards with it today.   All of them VERY different, which goes to show how versatile this set is.

I was really inspired by the challenge across at Less Is More:

There are so many ways you can go with this challenge and, as I have been really hankering for walks along the beach, I had an itch that I really needed to scratch.... I had this image in my head of walking along the beach, finding a little pool of water and kicking around in it - and this stamp from the Beautiful You stamp set was ideal for creating that :-)

I started with a piece of Bristol smooth watercolor paper and used painter's tape to mask off a border all the way around the image.  I thenstamped my image in StazOn on to the watercolor layer.   In order to protect the image from the watercolored background, I covered the inside of the image with Moltow liquid masking and dried it with my heat gun.

I then worked with 5 colors of ink from my Altenew selection - mixed with water.   Creating the splatters was the hardest, as I needed to ensure they were just in the right spot - after all, I needed to show that she had kicked up the water :-)

I used my heat gun to dry the layers of watercolor in between applications.  Once I was happy with the background, I removed my Moltow mask and added a minimal amount of color to her hat, and also gave her brown legs and arms - to show that she had been around the beach for a little while and was really enjoying it :-)  I purposely left the dress white.  There's nothing that screams summer like a crisp white cotton dress - or pants :-)   To finish the card, I added some gel roll pen to the puddle and the splatters.

Here's a close up of that:

All that was left to do was to add a sentiment that I thought really fit the image, and then mount the watercolor paper to a card base.

Here's my card:

I don't know about you, but there are multiple times I have found myself walking along a beach and found a little puddle of trapped seawater and had the need to run through it - reminiscent of the times I would run through rain puddles as a kid.:-)  there is something so carefree and innocent about this image - and I absolutely love it.   I agree with Sandy when she said that this set is Stampin' Up! at their old-time best.  Fabulous set :-)

On a personal note:

Oh... I swear, I sat in my craft room today and watched the grass go green in the wetland.  Honestly, I am not kidding.  It was a little bit green this morning from all the rain we have had but, by this afternoon, it was REALLY starting to turn green :-)  I took some photos and will be sharing those with you tomorrow.

However, I wanted to share a photo that I took Friday night when the storms were coming in.  The sky was an amazing color and the clouds enormous - totally dwarfing the trees across the wetland.  

ETA.... the photo that I forgot to include :-)

The only pop of color, other than the cloudy sky, is the White Cedars.  One again, they have survived the winter and were the perfect place for so many of our birds to roost and keep warm.  We are so glad we planted them.  We do have to wrap them in winter with burlap, but that provides even better coverage for the birds, and ensures that the deer stay away from  them.

The deer are perfectly camoflaged against the brown grasses in the wetland.

I hope you all had a wonderful Easter.  I'll be back tomorrow with another card.  In the meantime, warm hugs and prayers for those of you who need a little lift tonight.

Hugs

Jaydee

Card recipe:

• Stamps:  Beautiful You (Image).  Sentiment:  Your Next Stamp
• Inks:  Stazon.   Altenew
• Paper:  Bristol smooth watercolor; Neenah Solar White (base)