I hope you are having a great week!  I am slowly coming back to reality after a week vacation.  Our family took a wonderful trip to San Diego last week…what a treat!  The boys both had some real favorites events.  Oldest loved seeing the USS Midway and all the airplanes while the youngest enjoyed both the zoo and Sea World.  I love a vacation that can allow everyone to see something that feeds their interests!

So I finally got back into the craft room yesterday and that always seems to be a slow process for me.  Fortunately, Karren created a fabulous (and really workable) sketch for Freshly Made Sketches that made it a bit easier.  I knew I wanted to use these pretty flowers from Altenew (Botanical Garden) and also pulled inspiration from Altenew’s April Inspiration Challenge.  I loved the blue and the yellow and also the bokeh styling of their photo.

For my flowers, I wanted to try a new to me technique.  I have some sneak peek Petal Point inks from Clearsnap that are pigment inks so I tried this technique from Jennifer McGuire.  It is a little bit messy but I agree with Jennifer that using your fingers to apply ink is easy to control.  It also allowed me to have a bit of a splattered look on the flowers per the inspiration.

The fun part with pigment ink is that it stays stickier for a little longer and that allows time to be able to come back and emboss the whole image.  The effect gives a bit of shine and depth to the card that is hard to capture in a picture.  For my center panel of the sketch,  I cut a piece of Thick Whisper White and embossed it with the Woodgrain Embossing Folder (SU).  It adds a subtle texture without pulling attention from the flowers.

I hope you are off to a great week.  I’m back to stamping today and a bit of gardening too.  I love this time of year in Virginia and my youngest is still off this week for break.  We are getting the gardens all ready for planting our vegetables and re-mulching to get things tidy after the winter.  I’m lucky he is such a great helper!  Thanks for stopping in today.  See you soon! Supplies:

Stamp:  Botanical Garden (Altenew), Sentiment (Paper Pumpkin by SU) ; Ink: Versafine Onyx Black, Petal Point Pigment Inks; Paper:  Thick Whisper White; Accessories:  Clear Embossing Powder, Heat Tool, Big Shot, Woodgrain TIEF (SU), Dimensionals, Basic Pearls (SU), Black Sharpie Marker