Simon Says Stamp STAMPtember Blog Party + Free Gift With Purchase!

This post was sponsored by Simon Says Stamp. Thanks, Simon!

Well hello friends, and welcome to the Simon Says Stamp STAMPtember Blog Party! We are partying it up to celebrate the 15th STAMPtember celebration! If you’re new to STAMPtember, it’s an entire month dedicated to the joys of this stamping hobby, filled with tons of fabulous products, giveaways, and fun surprises to inspire your crafting! Today’s party starts over on the Simon Says Stamp blog, and it features an absolutely crazy amount of inspiration using the new release. Not only do you have the opportunity to feast your eyes on beautiful inspiration projects using the new goodies from the STAMPtember release, you also have the opportunity to do a “scavenger hunt” of sorts; each party stop has a unique graphic and code featuring a fabulous gift with purchase! You can see all of the details for my scavenger hunt code at the bottom of this post. 🙂

For my projects today, I did some therapeutic no-line watercoloring with the new Grateful Florals stamps and dies and some of my favorite Daniel Smith watercolors. Let’s get started with the details on my projects!

To start, I stamped all of the floral images from the new Grateful Florals stamps and dies onto some Arches Hot Press watercolor paper using Contour Ink from Hero Arts. I taped the panel down to my watercolor board to avoid warping, then used several shades of burnt orange, deep magenta, and coral red with some verdant greens to add lots of vivid color to the images. The key with no-line watercolor is to keep the wet sections separate from each other to avoid the wet areas bleeding into one another, which helps to keep the definition between the individual petals and leaves. I like to do lots of layers of color, which helps to develop the contrast between the areas in front versus behind. As a final touch, I added some highlights to the edges of some of the petals using white gouache, helping to increase the levels of contrast!

For my first card, I decided to take advantage of the generous size of the main floral bouquet by creating an A7 card. I began by running a panel of vellum through my die cutting machine using the new Tiny Tufts embossing folder. I then used my trimmer to cut out the center of an A7 card front, creating a window in the center of my card behind which I could adhere the embossed vellum panel. I adhered the vellum with some Tear-rific Tape and enhanced the frame with two widths of glittering A7 Thin Frames.

After I had created my card base, I adhered the large watercolored and die cut bouquet from the Grateful Florals product suite using some foam adhesive. I heat embossed a sentiment, also from Grateful Florals, onto some coordinating magenta cardstock using white embossing powder and die cut it with its coordinating die. I tucked a delicate twine bow beneath the sentiment and finished the card off with some Taffy Pawsitively Dazzling Gems for added sparkle! I love the drama and extra large size of this card!

Because I had also watercolored the extra little standalone flowers and foliage, I decided to create a sweet little coordinating gift card envelope. I die cut the Gift Card Envelope Die from some white cardstock and trimmed down a panel to fit on the front using some more white cardstock. I ran that smaller panel through my die cut machine, again using the Tiny Tufts embossing folder for some lovely, somewhat neutral botanical texture behind my floral watercolored pieces. I popped up the standalone watercolored pieces from the Grateful Florals product suite using some foam adhesive, finally adding another heat embossed sentiment, a twine bow, and some more Taffy Pawsitively Dazzling Gems. How special would it be to receive this with a gift card in it?

Well, that’s all for my projects today! I have tons more inspiration to share using the new items from the STAMPtember release, so if you’re not subscribed to my blog already, you can do that by entering your email address in the box on the top left hand side of my blog to make sure that you don’t miss anything!

To help celebrate and make this party truly exciting, each participating blog has it’s own fabulous freebie gift with purchase! To receive your freebie from my specific graphic, you can follow the instructions on the graphic below:

Isn’t that Beautiful Friend stamp and die set simply fabulous?? And what an incredible value! All you have to do to receive it is spend $100 in the Simon Says Stamp store, which is super, super easy to do with the incredible new STAMPtember release!

Be sure to check out all of the participating blogs over on the Simon Says Stamp blog to find all of the fantastic freebies that are available as a free gift with purchase to celebrate the 15th STAMPtember celebration! Thanks so much for stopping by, and happy STAMPtember!!!