You Matter

As we are wrapping up our final two weeks of summer before the kiddo heads back to school, we’re squeezing in lots of last-minute fun. One of things we enjoy doing every summer is going to our local bowling alley. The USBC hosts a program known as Kids Bowl Free and our local bowling alley participates. For a one-time fee, you can enroll the whole family and get 2 free games every weekday. My son has taken a particular interest in bowling and is actually quite good at it. This summer, he has added the youth bowling league to his list of regular activities and is planning to continue for the fall league. Right now, his team is about midway in the pack as far as standings so he’s working hard to improve his game. As with any sport, this is adding up to new equipment and lessons and time, but we absolutely love how much he loves it! And I can think of far worse things to spend money on!

We’re continuing our series this week called In the Garden. And today, we’re making our way through the cut flowers. One of my absolute favorite summer flowers is the zinnia. They come in so many happy colors and their blooms just keep going and going. I also love that they’re fairly hard to kill. *wink* Stampin’ Up! has a wonderful bundle of products called Flowering Zinnias that includes paper, stamps, dies, and embellishments; and today’s card features a portion of those products.

I recently saw a card by Stamp With Brenda that combined shades of red and light pink and just loved it, so that inspires our card today. We get started with a base of Poppy Parade cardstock. A quarter sheet of embossed Poppy Parade serves as our backdrop. It’s been cut down slightly and then machine embossed using the Zinnia embossing folder. Our focal panel has lots of beautiful layers. We get started by cutting a large square of white cardstock using the largest square from the Nested Essentials die set. Using the Painted Lavender and Simply Zinnia dies, we cut a combination of greenery stems. Our zinnia blooms are cut from Real Red cardstock to give a little contrast and help them pop against the busy backdrop. Our sentiment from the Something Fancy set is stamped in Poppy Parade on Petal Pink cardstock and then diecut using the smallest diamond die from the Nested Essentials set. This is all layered on top of a bit of iridescent striped trim and adhered to our card front with varying layers of dimensionals. A few iridescent discs are scattered on our card front to draw the eye to our focal section.

Tomorrow we’re going to look at several ways to use busy patterned paper to create stunning floral card designs. I hope you’ll drop by.

Products used in today’s card:
Poppy Parade, Shaded Spruce, Summer Splash, Mossy Meadow, Petal Pink, Real Red, Basic White cardstock
Something Fancy stamps
Deckled Rectangles, Painted Lavender, Simply Zinnia dies
Zinnia embossing folder
Iridescent striped trim
Iridescent discs
Dimensionals
Adhesives

Product List