Friday, June 23, 2017

Happy Summer!

It's official, summer has arrived! When I was a kid I loved the Nat King Cole song "Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer". I thought it was everything summer should be. I miss staying out past dark, catching lightning bugs in mayo jars and using slate (because no one had chalk) to make hopscotch boards on newly poured asphalt. Mostly I miss having a pool in the backyard. Those were the days!

Back to the present. I'm going to start with paper and end with paper, again. I love paper!

I love, love, LOVE these two new papers from Alexandra Renke. I've combined them in the photo with several of the child themed dies we have from AR. I especially love the giraffe as I was a follower of April the giraffe when the world was waiting for her to have her calf.( I apologize for this being upside down. I have repeatedly tried to rotate this photo and while I can in my photos on my computer, once I import into Blogger it does not accept the rotated version, argh!)


Next up are new dies from Heartfelt Creations. Also new is the paper pack towards the back of the photo. These are great for your wedding and engagement photos for layouts and cards.

Do you ever need a small sentiment and have to look all through your stamp sets for a basic phrase or title? How about one of these from Memory Box's Open Studio collection. Nice, classic phrases in classic fonts for multiple uses.

OK, I'm in love with several of these new Altenew stencils and stencil sets. From RIGHT to LEFT - the first two dahlia stencils can be used individually or layered over one another. If you are a follower of Jennifer McGuire you have seen her video on how to use several of these sets. I've added a link farther down. I will warn you though, they are almost all gone!

Here are two card samples from Laura Bassen, a member of the Altenew Design Team. The cube is my favorite. Here are links to  Jennifer McGuire's and Laura Bassen's blog sites showing how they created cards using the cube stencil and several other stencils in the collection. Simple gradient coloring adds a wonderful pop of color to the grid stencil.

Lastly, I stumbled on these papers from Authentique, another of my favorite companies. Their papers are a really good weight and have a bit of texture to them. I thought this line would be great for a recipe book of vintage recipes from your family or even photos in a scrapbook of cooking with grandma or your own kids. Hopefully a little inspiration for your day.

That is it for me today. Please remember that we have tickets for the Stamp, Scrap, Art Tour coming to the Hamburg Fairgrounds in August. Pick them up at the store in advance and save yourself from waiting in line. We are also working on the new classes for July and August. We will have them up on the website by July 1, if not a day or so earlier. Have a great weekend and I'll see you next week.

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