Deal of the Week – April 12 to April 19th
Buy 3 items and you’ll get a 4th one free!
As usual on this sort of thing – the lowest priced item is the free one. Current Promotion sale items are not included.
Also, I was blown away by this gorgeous card that Holly Craft sent to me! Holly is a fantastic watercolor artist. Want to try your skills with this stamp? It’s on sale for 50% off right now, so go ahead! 208H Pinecone in Basket.
I do lots of canning in the summer. It always seems to be the hottest day of the year when I have to can 40 pounds of tomatoes. So of course the house ends up feeling like a steam bath and I’m thinking “A can of tomatoes is 75 cents and I’m spending $75 on air-conditioning just so I can have home-canned tomatoes!” It just seems insane! But now, when the work is all done and I look at my shelf in the basement with the stacks of sparkling red, yellow, and green hued jars I get an enormous feeling of accomplishment. And come January when we’re feasting on crunchy dill pickles and tomatoe-basil soup it’s even better! This beautiful, water colored card from Holly Craft evokes that same feeling. For the past month Holly has been posting gorgeous photos and tips for her water color techniques on her blog. Be sure to hop over there and see! Holly’s card below was made using Serendipity Stamps cling set, 348QCL – Herbs and Jars.
The sugar snap peas in my garden finished up about a month ago. They are one of my favorite vegetables to grow. So easy to plant (nice big seeds you just plop into the dirt) and you can start picking them and eating them in aearly June! Once it gets hot, they’re done, and then you don’t have to pay attention to them anymore! I’ve gotten a couple of wonderful cards from the design team made with our two new “pea” images and thought I’d share them with you along with a picture of my garden peas.
The cards below were all made using 1210QCL Peas Cling Set, or the individual stamps 1210F Pea Package, and 1211D We’re Like Two Peas. The card below was made by Anya Schrier – first the outside of the card, then the inside.
The card below was made by Kathie Bailey.
And last but not least is a card from Sue Eldred.
In my last post I mentioned seeing lots of Goldfinches at my bird feeder. Well just last week I saw a Goldfinch AND and an Indigo Bunting on the feeder at the same time. It looked like a tropical rainforest with all those bright colors! There’s a little wooded area with a creek near the end of our road and that’s where the Indigo Buntings hang out. I don’t know if they like the shade, the water, or the water bugs, but it’s always a treat to see them flit by. Here’s a picture of an Indigo Bunting in case you’ve never seen one – I hadn’t before a few years ago.
I love it when stampers get creative with our stamps. Color a Coneflower yellow and it becomes a Sunflower. Put a snowman in front of a summer porch, add some white gel pen to the bushes and you have a winter scene. Kathie Bailey simply colored our new little Goldfinch blue instead of yellow and viola! He’s an Indigo Bunting! Kathie used our new Goldfinch 1219G and Quick Note Vertical 251D to create the outside of her note pad.
One day, about a month ago, I saw 6 little Goldfinches at the bird feeder at one time! Oh they were sad little sights. Not worthy of the name “gold” at all. But over the next couple of weeks it was like someone had dipped them in a bucket of bright yellow paint (well – the boys at least, the poor little mama’s were still as drab as could be). Now they all look like the beautiful little bird you see on Lynda Benden’s Memo Pad below. She used the Goldfinch – 1219G, A Little Note – 553E, and Bitti Notes – 050C images, which are all sold together in the Goldfinch Cling Set – 1219QCL.
The new Summer Release is on the www.serendipitystamps.com website! And, just like I’ve been describing for spring stamps, these summer stamps were inspired by what I see around me everyday. I’ve heard from a lot of folks who don’t get to see redbud trees in bloom or wild turkeys in the back yard – but they did at one time – and our stamps bring back those memories for them.
Our little piece of land sits on a 2-lane highway in western Missouri. When we bought the place, I noticed some pretty pink and white flowers growing along the pasture fence up by the road. I asked a neighbor and she told me that they were Sweet Peas. Below is a notepad that Anya Schrier created for our DT Notepad Challenge. Anya does a beautiful job of collage with several different word images plus the Sweet Pea 1215H and Earth Laughs 417D images that are both included in the 1215QCL Sweet Pea Cling Set.
Here’s a close up of Anya’s project. Watch for more posts this week showcasing our new Summer Stamps!
A few of the Iris have started blooming! A few years ago, a woman in my town who raises a huge variety of Iris thinned her beds and gave me a garbage sack full of bulbs. Well, I’ve been remis over the years and many of the colors have died away leaving me with mostly purple and white. But even they are breath-taking and provided the inspiration for our Iris stamps – 546K and 547E. Below the Iris is a beautiful card created by Pat Connelly. On Pat’s card, you’ll also see the Spring Flower Background 578H and We Turn Not 573D.
One of the best things about Spring Turkey Hunting is the morel mushrooms! Occasionally, well more like, very infrequently, my husband will come home with a turkey, but he always comes home with a sack of morel’s and I like them better anyway. One day last week we saw this young lady walking around in our back yard (don’t worry – hens are safe during spring turkey season). She would take a few steps, then make a high pitched “chirp” then walk a bit more. Probably looking for love and hopefully she found it and in a couple of months we’ll see her and her chicks walking by.
This isn’t exactly a “spring” turkey card, but it is one of my favorite cards of all time. It’s super easy and beautiful! Sue Eldred used 800K Turkey Large to create this card. You can also get a small version of the same image – 801E Turkey Small.
I don’t have an image of a Morel mushroom – and I need to remedy that. But I do have a Toadstool – 1012G that makes beautiful cards – just don’t eat anything like these that you find out in the woods.
They say that one of the benefits of a hard winter is less bugs in the spring – from what I can see that won’t be the case here in western MO (those dang ticks are out in droves already!) However, a real honest to goodness benefit to a hard winter IS lilacs. I have two lilac bushes – a deep purple one that I bought from a local nursery when we first built our house and a white lilac that grew from a shoot that I pulled up at an old abandoned farm house. Both were just gorgous this year! I filled vases so full of lilacs that Martha Stewart would have been jealous and we all swooned from the scent. Here are some photos of the lilacs and the stamp image – 200L - they inspired and a beautiful card made by DT member Kathie Bailey.
Someone asked me the other day what provided the inspiration for new rubber stamp designs. I couldn’t really come up with an answer at that time, but it’s been running through my head as I go about my daily life. Then it hit me - “daily life” is what inspires me. No – not dirty dishes, or email. The GOOD stuff, the beauty and wonder that comes along every day is what inspires me. So I’m going to spend a couple of days pointing out some things that have inspired some of Serendipity’s stamps.
Below is the view coming down my driveway this week. And to think – this is not landscaping – just Mother Nature in all her glory! Blooming redbuds only last a short time and the very best time to see them in on a cloudy day just after an April shower.
This view is just as pretty in January, though not as colorful. But it was the inspiration for 1194H – Winter Fenceline, shown below. All it takes is someone full of imagination, like DT member Anya Schrier, to turn January into April, as you can see in the card further down.
