Welcome back to a brand new week! I hope everyone enjoyed a restful weekend. We enjoyed watching more of the Olympic Games. Hard to pick a favorite event because we enjoy watching many of them. Have you been watching?

This week is our last week of summer break. School will be back in session on Monday and we’re still squeezing in all the end-of-summer fun. Break felt both short and long all at the same time! Did summer feel that way to you?

In honor of a new school year, this week’s design theme is back to school. And I must admit that I may have bitten off a little more than I can chew with this one. But I promised a week of using our products in surprising ways, didn’t I?! Well, I will certainly have to in order to work within our theme!

Today’s outside the box opportunity is solving a sentiment dilemma when you don’t have a stamp that fits the bill. How did I solve it? Well, let’s talk about our card and find out.

We get started with a base of Pool Party cardstock. After cutting a pice of white cardstock into quarter sheets, I used the Bright Skies dies to cut the two large clouds for the bottom of our front panel scene. Layers of dimensionals give the clouds are more realistic look against our Pool Party backdrop. I used my computer to set up a Word document sized to my quarter panel, sized up the space I would need to fill the medium cloud die, and printed my sentiment on the white cardstock. I then diecut the sentiment with the cloud die. I really wanted large font for the sentiment and that meant orienting my cloud in an unconventional way. But then, when you think about it, clouds come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, so is there really a conventional orientation? *grin* Several layers of dimensionals allow the sentiment panel to rise above the rest of our scene.

For the balloons, I pulled out the Hot Air Balloon stamps and dies set. I really liked the patterns that the Bright and Beautiful designer paper pack had to offer and decided I would layer the balloon shaping stamps on top. I think it turned out pretty neat. Our balloon baskets are cut from gold foil specialty paper. Each balloon is adhered on a different layer to give lots of dimension to our scene and really reinforce the sentiment theme of rising to new heights.

One of the fun things about challenging ourselves with various themes or ideas is that we don’t always have everything we think we need to pull it off. But with a little creative thinking and using tools that we maybe don’t turn to as often in a certain medium, like the printer in this case, we can usually make it work with beautiful results.

Tomorrow, we’ll be trucking along to school. I hope you’ll tune in to see what that’s all about!

Products used in today’s card:
Pool Party, Basic White cardstock
Bright & Beautiful, gold foil DSP
Hot Air Balloon stamps & dies
Bright Skies dies
Rainbow dots
Dimensionals
Adhesives

Product List