PAPER GARDEN - September 2015 Stamp Of The Month Blog Hop

Thank you for visiting my blog today. If you started here then you can hop to the next Rose Blossom in line when you get to the bottom of the screen. If you've already been hopping you got here through the ever so creative Marg.

Close To My Heart has a beautiful blog called Make It From Your Heart. It's my current motto for the new catalog cycle that just started today. That's exactly what happened when I inked up this Paper Garden stamp set. I had a vision before I started. But, when I started to try to create it everything fell apart so I gave up on having a plan and made this ... from my heart.

sentiment is from Your Own Kind of Wonderful stamp set 

I am the first to say, "I'm not artist." OR "I need to copy another idea."  A lot of people have heard me say, "I don't do time consuming layouts with just one photo on them. It's not practical." I say that a lot. I like to think I'm a practical scrapbooker. There are a LOT of photos to get in my books!!

BUT ... sometimes your daughter moves to college to begin a new life. And sometimes you don't know what to do with yourself when she isn't at home or coming back soon. And sometimes you run away to your papers and inks and pretend like none of that ever happened. And sometimes you create with tears in your eyes. It's in those moments that you really can't be practical. I'm so happy that I made this from my heart. This is my first time to scrapbook the beautiful senior portraits.

I'd love to post a "how to" for this but it was basically a messy experiment every step of the way. SOOOO many things wound up in the garbage before I could settle on an ink color or whether to color with markers or watercolor pencils.

Here's a little photo essay of a few things I stopped to take a photo of. 

white cardstock, & watercolor pencils

square coloring session ... NOPE

circle coloring session

water applied with paint brush

stamping with Glacier ink and Water Color pencils wherever 

That's where the photos of the process end. Here's a  close up of the after paintbrush version of water color pencils. You can see where the stamps are because you can see the Glacier ink. AND you can also see what a crazy mess it is. In the process of my initial stamping experiments I got a variety of different colors of inks on my blocks. There were a couple of oops moments when I wasn't paying good attention and those inks came off onto my project. (that's what the splattery looking spots are - you know what I'm talking about) I decided to embrace it and put "mistakes" in various places on purpose. The beauty of something like this is that it really doesn't matter how many mistakes you make or how closely you color in the lines. Water coloring isn't meant to be "sharp". It's a beautiful mess.

Thank you for checking out my blog today.

It's time to hop on. Kim Hill has something awesome to show you.


PS ... after looking at all of these photos I added some tiny bling to the pink blobs flowers. The new Enchantment Paper Fundamentals were perfect for mounting my photo. (Sapphire and Eggplant)