SEIZE THE BIRTHDAY!

Today I'm popping in as Surprise Party Guest at Seize the Birthday. This is the first time I've had the honor of participating in that capacity at this challenge - one of my favorites! The current optional theme is "Fruits".

                                        Seize the Birthday: Seize the Birthday #287- Fruits

It's times like these that I discover the real "holes" in my supplies. Fruits seem to be something I don't navigate toward when purchasing new products. So I headed off to my favorite craft store in search of something featuring some sort of fruit. With all of the fancy papers, stamps, dies, and other crafts available at their large inventory, I could only find two stamp sets - one featuring cherries and one featuring strawberries, and no fruit patterned papers. I settled on "Simple Vintage Berry Fields" #20120 from Simple Stories.

Once I had my choice of fruit stamp sets, I won't pretend I didn't struggle with this card! It took me hours to work out a design, and then I just ended up using only two of the stamp images and none of the sentiments (but now I have some more berry/Mason jar images to use in the future). Well, that's how it goes sometimes - I'm sure that much of my struggle was related to performance anxiety and having to come up with something that was worthy of the challenge at Seize the Birthday!

I started with a Strathmore A7 card base and matching envelope. I stamped the strawberries each twice - once with red on white card stock and once dark green on green card stock. Then I blended with red ink and Copic markers, fussy cut the berries and stems and glued them together. So, once that was done, what to do with them? After several attempts to come up with a way to use them, I finally decided the more CAS the better, and opted for layering them with an old filigree boarder die (probably Hero Arts) and die cut it from some old green and white printed paper from my stash. I stamped the sentiment from PTI's "Tea for Two Addition" in their "Pinefeather" ink. I dug through the supplies to find some red and pink printed papers and settled on two very small scraps of PTI paper and had to piece the stripes together to make a wide enough piece to stretch the full length of the bottom of the card. Whew! I layered everything together with some dimensional foam and added some pink sequins.

  

After all of the struggle, I'm happy with the final product. My experience is that the more cards one produces, the more easily the ideas flow. That should be a lesson to me not to cut back my production as much as I have this year!

On a personal note: As I write this on Monday, the entire west coast of this country is hotter than hell this week. There are something like 17 wild fires in California and we sit just 30 miles from the California border. It was 111 here in Medford yesterday and the day before and expecting the same for the next couple of days. We've been getting out early to water veggies that I have in pots - and there's our little community of feral cats that are all struggling with the heat, sleeping most of the day. We're replenishing the water a couple of times a day, and last night the raccoons dropped by to help themselves. I think they're picking up dropped small plums from our flowering plum tree and rinsing them in the water before eating. The water was almost mud on the last filling about 10:00 last night!