New Start

 I just opened my blog for the first time in three years!  It's about time, you say, where have I been?

I was finding it too hard to maintain a blog as my job was taking a major amount of time and energy. Fortunately, except for the year of Covid from shut down until we all were vaccinated, the Cardologists have continued to stamp together.  That helped me keep my sanity.

At the beginning of this year, I finally found the idea of retirement less scary than continuing to work. So April 1 was my last day before starting this next chapter of life.   After two weeks of trying to adjust to the new lack of a schedule, my brothers and sister had a house fire that resulted in a total loss of their belongings.  Thankfully they are all safe and sound, and now, through the goodness of friends, they have found a house to rent until they can rebuild.

Tomorrow is my aunt's 90th birthday.  An occasion like that calls for a party and a special birthday card.  But I needed inspiration so I checked out some challenges I had bookmarked.  I found color inspiration at The Card Concept challenge 175.  A beautiful combination for roses, these looked like Flirty Flamingo, Daffodil Yellow, Mango Melody and Calypso Coral, and matched a picture my aunt recently finished in her coloring book. My style is clean and layered.

 The Retro Rubber Challenge 182 is Flower Power and I knew I had a very retro stamp featuring a vase of roses that my aunt had given me years ago.  Unfortunately that challenge ended this morning :-(

To celebrate that my aunt has made it to 90 years, I planned to add the number to the design and coincidentally, The Flower Challenge #68 just happens to be to use a number.

After blog surfing for the evening, I was ready to create.  I stamped the Stamp Rosa image by PSX on watercolor paper. 

  I scribbled the various marker colors on a block and used a waterbrush to color the image.  Unfortunately the coral looks brown in this picture. Now that I finished, the yellow didn't match the inspiration picture and should have all been mango.

I could have stopped with the 5 x 5 card, but bigger is better when you are celebrating.  I mounted the image to layers of Stamping Up paper, added a panel in Granny Apple Green (because green is her favorite color) that is embossed with vertical lines and features a gold '90'.  The final touches are miniature brass butterflies and a mango ribbon.