one stamp set... many cards...

Hello!  I hope everyone in the US had a wonderful 4th of July!  We had a pretty nice one.  The weather was typical for the Pacific Northwest in early July... cloudy and a little cold.  But that didn't stop the lighting of fireworks at our house or in our neighborhood!   Love 4th of July and what it means, but glad all the explosions are over for another year!   I recently received the Simon Says Stamp July card kit and it is jam packed full of fun products and a fabulous stamp set.  When I saw the kit I had to get it because of... flamingos!  I love flamingos and the stamp set included in the kit has a fun flamingo image as well as a die to go with it.   Shortly after the kit arrived I decided to stamp most of the images from the kit on watercolor paper and colored them with my ZIG markers.  I then trimmed out the ones that don't have a die (hoping that SSS will make dies to go with the rest of the images!).   After I had done that I set everything aside because I had other things going on and no time to do any crafting.   When I finally got some time on 4th of July to put some cards together the new color combo from Color Throwdown was up and I decided to color a two more flamingos to use on a card for that challenge.  Once I had the flamingos colored and die cut I die cut a panel of navy blue cardstock and then stamped it with the flamingo related sentiment on the cardstock with watermark ink and then heat set it in gold.  I arranged the flamingos and then adhered my panel to one of the white cards included in the kit.

This next card isn't for anything in particular.  I just wanted to make a card using the fish image and that punny sentiment that goes with it.   Once I had the fish colored I used one of the gold watercolors available in my Kuretake Gansai Tambi watercolor set to sort of dull the color and give them a hint of gold.   To create my "water"  background I pulled out a stencil from Hero Arts and Salty Ocean and Broken China distress oxide inks.  I had a piece of aqua colored cardstock floating around so I used that and stenciled on the waves.  Once I had the background stenciled I die cut the panel and then arranged the fish.  The sentiment was stamped using VersaFine CLAIR ink in Midnight.  I love the way that you can still see the stenciling through the dark blue ink.   I stamped the little bubbles at the same time I stamped the sentiment.  The fish were adhered and then I added some Star Dust Stickles to the bubbles.  The panel was then adhered to a teal cardstock base.  I'm going to add this to the current challenge at the Male Room challenge as their theme is fish/fishing.  This is my first time playing along with this challenge and found out about it through Instagram.

The final two cards came to be after I saw the current layout from CAS(E) this Sketch.  I made two white cardstock bases and then using the grid on my craft mat I masked off the area on each card base and inked up one using Broken China and Salty Ocean and the other using Squeezed Lemonade and Wild Honey.  I had already colored the pineapple and cactus so I simply stamped the sunglasses and the little flower added a little bit of color to each, trimmed them out and then adhered them to their respective images.  I splattered on a little water and once that was dry I stamped the sentiments using VersaFine CLAIR in Nocturne.   The images were then popped up on the card bases with foam adhesive.   Super simple, but rather cute don't you think?

I'm going to be honest and admit that while I love the stamp set I initially was stumped by how I was going to use it and that is why I decided to first color up some images and see where they would take me.

Supplies:  Cardstock:  white, navy, teal, aqua; Stamps:  Simon Says Stamp; Dies:  Simon Says Stamp and A Jillian Vance Design; Inks:  Ranger Distress Oxide; VersaFine CLAIR, VersaMark; Embossing powder:  gold; Watercolor medium:  ZIG Clean Color Real Brush markers, Kuretake Gansai Tambi; Stickles