A Melon Summer!

Happy Monday to you all--and Happy last week of April!  Wow, it's almost May already--seems like not that long ago we had 60" of snow on the ground and now all my trees & flowers are blooming and last night we had severe thunderstorms, yikes!  I'm more than ready for summer though--I love the hot weather and bright sun, nothin' better!  Yesterday was my daughter's 14th birthday and I think she had a pretty good birthday.  Friday night she had friends over, they went to the movies and then camped out in the backyard AND lasted until 7:30 am the next morning!  Yep, at 3:30 am they were waking me up having a Nerf gun fight in the backyard in the 50 degree weather, brrrrrrrrrrrr!  No sleep for the weary ya know and some of those girls had to go play soccer and lacrosse games that day, lol!  On Sunday James and the kids took our 1 dog on a charity 5K walk--I didn't make it cuz I had tripped in my craftroom (not surprising, I trip A LOT, lol) and pulled my lower back, so me and Casey (my older cairn who couldn't walk that far) stayed at home.  I didn't want to make it worse before I leave for Disney.  Then we went to dinner for Alexa's birthday---she got 2 tickets to the Taylor Swift concert in June, a silver/blue topaz key necklace and a bunch of clothes & gift cards from us.  She made out pretty well, lol!  And I'm gearing up for my trip to Disney World on Thursday to celebrate my birthday with hubby and I've got lots to get done before I go (of course!)!!

NewsBitz:

-Want that NEW Zutter Distress electronic tool---7 Kids has it for ONLY $27--that's a steal!  Marti has mine, so I hope to get it from her when I get back but I LOVE that thing! Awesome for distressing!  Also NEW in stock are Zva embellishments (I want one of each, hee hee) and the McGill Strongarm tool (a must have) for all those that have issues with your punches, I use this A LOT, makes punching easy!

-For those that entered for the $25 gift certificate blog candy by guessing what time the girls would come inside---well they made it all night!  So there were a few of you that said she would last all night so I have to print your names out and have Alexa draw a winner.  I will post that tomorrow for you!

-Susana's Store will be having a fantastic NEW RELEASE from Elisabeth Bell this Friday--the DT will be having a Blog Hop to show off these super-cute (cutest evah) stamps!  And you can enter to WIN some awesome Blog Candy on the store blog HERE!

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Melon Summer!

This lil' cutie is a High Hopes stamp from Paper Romance--isn't she a cutie!  Amy of Paper Romance has a HUGE selection of High Hopes stamps in stock (and if there is one you want that's not on the site, she'll custom order it for ya).  If you haven't used these before you've been missing out--they stamp so nicely and there are so many cute stamps of every variety.  This one is called "Summer Sweetness" and she is sweet isn't she?!  (shhh....don't tell but I HATE melons of all kinds--just don't like them at all) LOL--but a watermelon sure is a symbol of summer isn't it?  I paired her with perfect watermelon colors of pink, red and green--the dp is from GCD Studio's "Homespun" collection and then PTI cs.  I embossed the background with the CB folder "swiss dots" (my all-time fave) and then the corner brackets are from an SU punch.

She's colored with Copics of course (melon: R24,R22,R20,YG67,YG63,G20/ dress: RV17,RV14,RV10/ hair: E25,E31,E50) and then I coated the red part of the watermelon with diamond glaze.  The grass, lace trim and the white rind of the melon got stardust stickles on them for some fun sparkle.  A perfect summertime card!

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Enjoy!

Since I was on a watermelon kick it made me think about the cute Itty Bitty Watermelon stamp I have from Lockhart Stamp Co--I had to use it!!  I love making 4x4 notecards (I buy the envies here)--they're so cute and fun to create and you can use much smaller images on them.  The sentiment is from PTI's "Handwritten Notes" set and I just love the saying!

I kept the layout pretty simple--lots of white with kicks of red & black!  The background is embossed, the watermelon is colored with Copics and some stickles for sparkle and then 2 strips of red cs in the background as well.  A few pearls finish them off--just a fun bunch of cards (I made 4) for the stash!  I whipped 4 of these up in 20 mins so just think of all the lil' mini cards you could make and the Lockhart IB stamps are perfect for these!

See ya back here tomorrow!