Four Seasons

When I picked up yet another piece of Always Artichoke the other night (I guess because it is one of the colors of the month, along with Cherry Cobbler), I said, enough is enough!  I challenged myself to make four non-Christmas cards.  It's 85 degrees out and not even Halloween, for heaven's sake!  Why am I crazy for Christmas already??  Will I start making Valentines at Thanksgiving? 

 I mentioned before that I make up challenges for myself, not unlike art class assignments.  Use Color X and Color Y.  Use three different textures.  Etc.  Rather than make four "winter" cards, which was my first thought, I decided they needed to represent the four seasons.  I tried not to do my typical cherry blossoms in spring, flowers in summer, leaves in fall, and pine tree in winter options.  Here's what I came up with.

Spring

Since the Always Artichoke was already in my hand, I started with this card.  Spring means lots of green, and I added touches of faded purple to hint at the burst if color to come.  Also, I like purple and green together.  Mostly SU on this card, although the flowers are from a*muse studio and are embossed in a light lavender. The background is a wheel that I unmounted and turned into a flat stamp.

Summer

This is a simple card!  In fact, I've made a similar card with kids before (although I had to cut out a lot of the SU "Up, Up, and Away" balloons for them).  The "fields" are CASEd from a convention swap that used a similar embossed layers as the base for a large flower.  The clouds are punched from the Cupcake Builder punch, another technique I've seen elsewhere.  Not one drop of sponging, and voila, a quick and cheerful card for birthdays, get well, and maybe even bon voyage or retirement?

Fall

Needed my sponging back, and this card shows it.  I also used the spritzer, background stamps, heat embossing, crimping, etc.  All SU stamps, and I even added some glitter to the butterflies!  The crimped portion was also background stamped with Hello Doily to add more depth.  A little more somber than the other season's cards, but autumn does come with a sense of loss (at least for me, and especially with the baseball season's recent conclusion).

Winter

I love snowmen.  Have hundreds of them, and just about every snowman stamp I ever see ends up in my stash.  This one comes from Flourish, and he's watercolored.  I used some VersaMark stamping for the watermarked background, and the mittens have some flocking on them!  Simple but cute!  It could be a holiday card, I guess, but it would also work for a December through Februay birthday, although it seems to me to want to be an invitation to a "snow day" party. 

P.S.  No sponging here either! 

Other Thoughts on Snow

We're planning a snow day for the Girl Scouts, but that means several hours of travel for us to guarantee the white stuff!  It's strange to think of kids who don't know how to make snowmen.  When Erika was three, we had a wonderful snowfall on December 21.  Her mom decided they would make a snowman, and asked me to take some pictures.  I followed them outside where Linda began tamping snow into big plastic containers.  It took me a while to figure out that she was trying to make a snowman like a sandcastle!  Oh, those California girls!  ;-)

My other good snowman story comes from last year when we had measureable snow again (it's an event here).  Erika actually had a snow day from school during which she went outside and built a very nice four-foot tall snowman (using the correct method).  When her dad came home from work, he wanted to take a picture of her with her snowman.  While she was posing (holding the snowman's twig hand, I have to add), he asked her what his name was.  She replied, "Snowy."  Brian said, "Snowy?  Why not Frosty?"  Erika replied, "Frosty is a registered trademark, Dad."  Love it.  Now if I could just get college students to understand intellectual property laws. 

Challenges

I really do think challenging ourselves is important to nourish creativity.  But now I'm back to red and green as I duplicate the SU "Beautiful Season" card recently seen in the Lllam Blog Hop.  I already swapped about 40 of them at Jill Olsen's Fall event, I made another 20 for the llama Christmas swap,  and will be making 40 more for Dad to send as Christmas cards.  That makes an even 100, so I guess I really got my money's worth out of that set!  ;-)