Oh yeah! I don’t know if you look forward to this day as much as I do, but with my crafty time being much more limited these days, our little but mighty hop has become a bright star on a bleak horizon for me. With all of my other crafty obligations requiring me to use digis from specific companies, I am so very thankful that for this hop group we are focused on using things we actually bought because they inspired us!!! I have enough supplies to fill a craft store and they are hardly being touched, but every month my fellow squirrel sisters and I aim to change that! This month the theme is Florals and the technique/supply is Watercolors, which consists of so many possible water based mediums and so many ways to use them! And because I couldn’t pick just 1, I have 3 cards to share with you today!!! And I pulled out all kinds of older supplies that haven’t seen love in awhile, and a handful of Jane’s Doodles stamp sets that I’ve been dying to use!

Be sure to visit my uber talented friends on the hop who will undoubtedly rock this theme! Here is the line up in case you get lost along the way:

• Natasha Davies
• Marie Bingaman
• Lounon Riviere
• Karen Page – YOU ARE HERE
• Bory Yankova
• Anna Mahtani
• V Fairchild

For each of my 3 cards, I used a different media to watercolor with, just for fun (and to remind myself how out of practice I was!). Ready for the first card?

I showed some of my squirrel sisters an assortment of Jane’s Doodles floral sets and asked which they wanted to see me use. This one was the top choice! The set is called Wild Flowers and the sentiment is from another Jane’s Doodles set called Mother’s Day. A good friend of mine has been hard on herself lately often when she compares her art to others. I love her style just as it is, but I also understand the disappointment that we can’t all be Jennifer McGuire. I made this card for her because I just wanted her to know she is AMAZING. I suck at mailing cards (and the postal service sucks at delivering them) but I know she will see this card and know it’s for her 😊 I used an assortment of Zig markers to color the image and a waterbrush to blend the colors out. It seemed a little plain, so I colored an extra flower, fussy cut it and then popped it up with foam tape for dimension. Then I popped the whole panel up on more foam tape and added it to an white panel embossed with a Crafts Too folder called Spots. I like the subtle pattern in the background yet it doesn’t detract from the image. I had a couple extra images so I popped them inside:

Next up is a card watercolored with Distress Oxides:

This card is my favorite of the bunch! This beautiful image is from the Jane’s Doodles Hydrangea set. I used only Blueprint Sketch and Wilted Violet for the flower and was able to get so many different shades from just those 2 inks! The sentiment is from the aforementioned Mother’s Day set from Jane’s Doodles and it was stamped in Wilted Violet. I pulled another embossed panel from my stash of backgrounds… this one is embossed with an old Darice folder called Corner Scroll. I didn’t have coordinating purple cardstock to mat it, so I just inked the edges of the card base with Wilted Violet, then splattered it with water to remove some of the color for yet another watercolored look. And I added some matching epoxy dots to finish it off. I had an extra image from this set too, so I decorated the inside on this one too!

And now let’s look at my final card watercolored with Gansai Tambi paints!

These images are from yet another Jane’s Doodles set called Poppy (gotta love how aptly Jane names her sets!) but the sentiment is from the Hydrangea set. The background was pulled from my stash of previously created backgrounds, but it was made using a really old background stamp from Justrite called Ticking Stripe. After struggling with the Gansai Tambi paints (I think they are potentially going bad as they had a weird finish after they dried) I fussy cut all the images from the set out. I used 2 different thicknesses of foam tape to give the flowers dimension. The sentiment is heat embossed and die cut using a fishtail die from an old Cutter Bee set called Banners. I added a sprinkling of black half pearls to finish the front, and as I had 1 image left that didn’t make it to the card front, I added it to the inside like the others:

And check out the texture I got on the flower centers from just the paint! There is nothing added to the paper other than paint but it looks like Flower Soft or flock!

What this picture doesn’t show is a weird shimmery sheen one shade of the red paint has, which looks weird because the whole flowers doesn’t have the same finish. I’d add Wink of Stella but I don’t want to reactivate the paint and make more of a mess than it already is! LOL

If you are still here, I thank you a bunch!!! And now, please visit my sweet friend Bory who always does a beautiful job making floral cards! I’m betting she even has a video for you… as will Anna and Tasha, so don’t forget to hop to all 7 blogs!!! Remember the full lineup is on the top of this post 😊 so you can make sure you hit them all! Thanks for visiting and be sure to subscribe/follow if you like what we have made for you today! Or leave us a comment… it would mean the world to us!