Hello everyone and Happy Sunday! As we are SPRINGING ahead here in the United States with Daylight Savings Time, it is feeling a bit more like Spring is almost here. And with Spring comes warm weather and beautiful flowers.

I have been really enjoying making flower cards of late (I must be ready to say goodbye to the snow! haha!). I feel it is even more fitting to make a flower card today since it is Plant a Flower Day! With that theme in mind, I decided I wanted to use the gorgeous flower cling stamps from Prima. The illustrations on these stamps are so pretty; I’ve used both the Joyful Garden and Fresh Flowers #1 stamps. They are pretty large stamps, which cover the front of a card perfectly.

For the watercolors, I used Prima’s Watercolor Confections; these watercolors come in 5 different palettes. On these cards I used three: the Classics, Tropicals and Decadent Pies. I enjoy using these palettes . The watercolors are quite pigmented and give beautiful results in a variety of painting styles. In today’s video I created a “messy” style of watercoloring, which is really easy to achieve; I’ll be walking you through the steps I took to create the messy look effortlessly!

I love sentiments that are perfect for encouragement cards; the Be Strong stamp set from Altenew is one of my current favorites when it comes to uplifting sentiments! I stamped two of the greetings from that set with clear ink and heat embossed them with white powder.

The watercolor panels are trimmed down with the Simon Says Stamp Stitched Rectangle dies and I also tied a bit of Hemptique bamboo cord around the top.

Finally, I wanted to make a couple of matching envelopes for these cards… a card is made even more special when the envelope is decorated too! I used the We R Memory Envelope Punch Board to make the envelope from Mixed Media paper and then watercolored a soft, layered background. The background was created with a few watercolors that matched the card but were greatly diluted.

After watercoloring, I stamped a second generation of the flowers onto each of the envelopes using a gray ink from Altenew. Because I wanted the image on the envelope to be softer, the second generation creates more of a “ghosted” look and is not distracting.

I hope you enjoyed these cards and will be checking out the video to see how these cards came together! I really like how the heat embossed flowers resist the watercolor and create more subtle outlines. And paired with the messy watercolor effect, I think it makes for a very beautiful design!  Thanks for visiting me today… I will see you again tomorrow for a new Studio Monday video!

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Hi friends! Thanks for stopping by the blog today. Happy Saturday! We’re very happy to have first time guest to our blog, Dana Joy, as our featured artist on the blog today! I just love the happy colors she used to go with the fabulous sentiment from SugarPea Designs. Be sure to read on and enjoy!

This (Kindness Matters) is one of my favorite stamp sets from SugarPea Designs. It’s one that is always within arm’s reach in my craft room. The sentiments just remind me that there are still good people in the world.

I love making cards and sharing crafty happiness on a daily basis with friends, family and even strangers. So recently on a daily trip for coffee and chocolate frosted donuts with sprinkles I decided to make a card for the young lady who gets my order right every single time. She does this with a huge smile on her face and a cheerful hello and goodbye. Well she deserved a little bit of love today. Just that little act of kindness made this young lady’s day. Not only did she break out in a happy giggle but so did I. She ran around the counter just to give me a hug. See, that to me is what kindness is all about. Making someone’s day just a little bit brighter.

Sharing kindness is easy. It’s absolutely FREE to give. Doing this on a daily basis not only makes me feel good, it also does my heart some good too!

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Thanks for reading today, and thanks to Dana for being our guest!

Blog Candy Alert!! Follow our blog via email and comment on this post for a chance to win a special blog candy!

Hi friends! TGIF! We hope you enjoyed the reveal of our latest collection, New Beginnings, yesterday! Today, we’ve enlisted some super star designers to inspire you with ideas on how to use these fun new products! Hop along for lots of fun and prizes along the way!  Each stop along the hop will have a $25 gift card to Simon Says Stamp for one of their randomly selected lucky commenters.  Check the winners’ list on our Tuesday’s blog post.

Be inspired by work from around the globe!

Visit these blogs for mega inspiration:

Please comment below and let us know if you’ll have any crafty time this weekend!  You could win a $25 shopping spree to SimonSaysStamp.com!