Zinnia it Wonderful? And a tip.......

Okay....bad pun or bad play on words.  And, actually, I am not even sure that this flower is a zinnia but cut me some slack okay? - titles aren't my strong suit!  We are in the middle of an intense heat wave where I live and so I am  finally able to get inside and craft without feeling too guilty about it.  I am also on the downside of busy life for a few weeks and so that also gives me a chance to craft.  August will heat up with all three of my children moving from one place to another and so we have lots of weekends that will be spent moving kids and furniture.  Sheesh.....don't these kids know that mom and dad are 50 and 52?  Hmmmm, I am trying to think what age is the age that we parents are too old to do heavy lifting and moving.  My husband told the kids that we would help move but we would not help clean......Seriously????  -  the cleaning is the easy part!

 Yesterday I did a challenge.....and had a lot of fun with that card.  Today I finally got out my copics and colored.  Yep, I colored like a preschooler and boy oh boy was it fun.  And sooooo satisfying!  I haven't been able to find much time to color an image for a looooong time and so I went for a favorite theme of mine.....flowers and butterflies.  I also am still experimenting with stretching my dies.  I love a square card and have many square images like the one I used today but not many square dies.....at least the square dies I do have are never big enough for most of my images.  BUT! I do have lots of fancy rectangular dies.....and it took me the longest time and seeing many examples online before I put it together that other people were retrofitting their rectangular dies to fit a square card.  Duh!  So, it is a little more futsy than just cutting a die and placing it on the card but in the long run I like the results and more importantly I like that I can use my dies for more than one look!  So far I have only used rectangles but think that I can also use other shaped dies for this purpose.  My "mind's eye" doesn't see the possibilities right away so it takes me a bit to configure the dies....almost like working with a puzzle.

Today's card uses a large rectangular die from Spellbinders.  I cut it down quite a bit to get the square size that I wanted.  Then, I matched up the edging design and glued them down.  It is really hard to see the "seam" on this die but even so I decided to cover the seam with the ribbon.  While I am a "right hand corner ribbon" sort of gal this vertical placement is new for me and I like it!  The stamp image is a Northwoods Rubber Stamp Co. image which is one of my favie companies and the inside sentiment it from JustRite Stamps.  I am going to enter it over at Die Cut Diva's July Challenge.  It is Floral this month.  If you haven't visited that blog site I urge you to do so.  The ladies there are just the sweetest and they always have wonderful die tips.

I love the femininity of this card!  So fun to make after all the orange/black/white graduation cards!  I feel like it is "Springtime" in my cardmaking mind after the zillions of similar grad cards!

And here is the inside....not too fancy but just a little somethin'/somethin' to dress up the interior.

Now I am including here a past card that shows the die in all its full rectangular glory....changing it from a rectangle to a square really makes the die look different and fresh to my eyes ;-D

I also am going to include two other past cards that I made....grad cards that use the same design but I changed it up from a rectangle to a square by cutting down the die.  Can you tell I love this new option with my supplies?  Oh well, I am excited to discover something new...especially something new that doesn't cost me any moola!

Does anyone else have a cool new tip that they have discovered?

Thank you for stopping by today and thank you for wading/slogging/ trudging through my loooong post!  I hope that you all are having a good day and that you are enjoying your summer as well!

Be well,
Sheila