Hello stampers and happy Friday. Today I have gone a little out of my comfort zone to design a geometric poppies card. I wanted to challenge myself and do something a little different. Geometric designs are not my strong suit but I am quite happy with how my card turned out. What style do you struggle with?

Geometric Poppies

All of my peaceful poppies designer series paper was laying out and I just love so many of the designs and wanted to combine them on a card. That is how I came up with the idea of doing a geometric design with poppies. I started out with cutting a bunch of circles and squares with the stitched shape framelits. I scattered them on my background paper and played around a bit with what looked good together. Truth be told, it took a few different design layouts before I was satisfied.

The smaller squares got turned diagonally to make them diamonds and they are also all popped up to create more interest and dimenstion. I toyed around with the idea of creating a banner for the sentiment, mostly because I wanted to cover up that tiny black mark that I made.  The sentiment looked better stamped right on the card. A banner messed up the crisp lines of the geometric design. In the end I was playing around with needing just a little something extra and that is how I came up with the poppy from the Peaceful Poppies elements. It has been so much fun incorporating those elements into my peaceful poppy cards!

If you want to see another card that I made incorporating a geometric stamp set, you can see it here.

The Most Important Tool

I often forget to write about how often I use my stamparatus. It really is the most important tool! For this card I used it to stamp my sentiment. Especially if your ink pad is of a certain vintage, your sentiment might not turn out as dark and crisp as you like. If you use the stamparatus then you can stamp several times in the exact same spot for absolute perfection. You see, the stamparatus is a stamp positioning tool. If you want to see a video on it, you can see it here.

A Little Vintage

Last night I caught up with some more cousins, this time it was two daughters from my mom’s favourite sister growing up. Tante Adrie (short for Adriana) was younger than mom by 16 months. She came to visit Mom in Canada when I was a year old and my cousins had some pictures from the visit for me. Some of them I had never seen before so that was really special!

The first time I looked at this photo of my Pap, I didn’t even see myself looking through the back window of the truck!!

With my mom my sister Adriana and my brother Oliver. I was about a year old here. Looks like I am either ready for a nap or just woke up!!

I’m pretty sure my dad made these little wooden chairs. This is me with my cousin Dan. It is so nice coming across pieces of your own history and to see how our stories intertwine. Thanks for indulging my walk through nostalgia!

Happy Mail in Holland

I just came back from a little shopping trip with Gerard’ sister. We hit a few used stores, they are called “kringloop” here. I found some great little leather shoes for the grandkids, some Royal Albert Old Country Roses dishes and a cute little book with all Dutch words for the grandkids. When I came home I checked the mailbox and there was happy mail. Thanks Gertie Boven, I will blog about your card tomorrow. I haven’t even opened it yet!

I just had to take a picture of these cute little “bikes”. They teach the littles how to have good balance so they can bike right away without training wheels.

PDF Tutorial

If you are liking the Peaceful Poppies cards, you will be happy to know that I now have a complete pdf tutorial for all ten cards. Here is a picture. Just click the buy now button if you want it. It’s that simple! It does take a bit before I get the notification from PayPal, but when I do I will send it to you.

Thanks!

Thanks so much for popping by today, I always feel like we have had a little chat together. I am hoping to start writing like a fiend after this and get a good chunk of my new Peaceful Poppies pdf tutorial done. First a live video with my training group and then nose to the grindstone. It was fun playing tourist this morning, tomorrow I will share some more pictures.

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