A little inspiration for you on Thursday...

It's official, July 4th has come and gone - IT'S SUMMER! Although, I'm with Sue and her post from earlier this week. I no like the heat! I'm starting with a little inspiration for you. If you're like me you love these beautiful detailed stamps from Penny Black but hesitate to color because you need something to give you specific examples of how to color them. So we took several new Penny Black stamps and made cards. These cards give you color schemes along with shading examples that you can copy or choose another color family and copy. To be honest, I copy a lot. I really want to see the stamp in color so I know where to start. Often I can then pick my own colors with a lot less hesitation. So here are some examples to inspire or simply give you something to copy to get the idea of the coloring how you want it.

We also have an example from Stampendous.

This last card is done using paper piecing and the new IO animal dies. Again, it gives you a color template to start with.

New Stuff! Reverse Confetti has several new dies and stamp sets for you.

Lil' Inker also has some new stamp sets and background dies.

During the heat, while I sit in air conditioned comfort, I spend the month of July in France. I am a sports couch potato. I get up some mornings at 6-6:30 and start my morning tour of the French countryside watching 120+ men bicycle over 100 miles a day. I'm a Tour de France groupie! I look forward to my three weeks in France every summer. I watch the cyclists bike through fields of grapes and sunflowers, quaint French towns and past beautiful chateaus. I understand about 1/2 of whatever the commentators are talking about with regards to strategy and I have my favorites but mostly I watch the countryside because, honestly, how these men do this is beyond me. It is the most grueling, painful, agonizing sport there is and it goes on for THREE WEEKS!

One of the things I did during the first two stages of the race (and the Wimbledon tennis) was to do some fussy cutting. I love G45 paper. I especially love their 'title sheet' that has the title of the collection on it. In many cases I can take this sheet and pop up the images on it for a little dimension. It sometimes takes two, three and four extra sheets of the title sheet to get the dimensioning layers I want and I sometimes add an element from a different page in the collection, like the white macaw in this photo. I'll have the page in the store so you can check it out if you'd like and maybe try a little fussy cutting yourself.

That's about it for this week. Stay cool, and happy crafting!