Picture Perfect Summer Day

If you've ever been around small children in the summer, you know one of their favorite things to do is play in a wading pool. It doesn't matter that the water is only 8 inches deep, they need a ring and floaties and of course goggles. When the challenge at Tiddly Inks this week said Summer Fun with Sun, Sand and Toys, I knew the exact images I wanted to use.

I knew I had to do these two cuties in a wading pool, so I went to work with my Cricut and the wonderful MTC software. I found a clip art of a wading pool, copied it into MTC and then went to work refining the cut image. I punched the stars in the pool, which required 4 layers for the pool which gives it dimension. I found the clouds in the gallery of MTC(one of the many reasons I love MTC). I love digis for so many reasons, but one of them is the fact that you can easily combine two images and know you have them in the right place before you print. When I originally did the card, I did it without a sentiment in mind. When the sentiment popped in my mind, I knew I had to frame the image, which necessitated me taking the card apart and starting over. I created the sentiment in Photoshop Elements and printed it on yellow for a little "sun. The base card is blue and the grass was a piece of scrap paper. I colored my images in Copics and as a final touch, I had to add bows to her hair. After all, I am from the south and little girls have to have bows.

Thanks for stopping by, and why don't you join us over on the Tiddly Inks Challenge Blog. There's a $10 coupon up for grabs. Oh and be sure and check out the other summer images located at the Store.

Good Morning All,

It's a beautiful day here in the Deep South, but looking to be a very hot one with a possibility of some T-storms this afternoon. Won't bother me though as I'll be in TM playing as soon as I get this uploaded and clean up the mess that I created yesterday.

Yesterday was probably one of my all time most productive day. It helps of course that I wasn't using colored images, cards were mass produced, and it only involved cutting and taping. Coloring slows me down considerably.

This first card was made from an image that I colored forever ago. In fact it's one of the first things I ever colored with Copics. I decided to put it into a card and slip it into my OWH card box. I thought it would be perfect for some Dad to send to his little cowboy. We're really into cowboys here, as our grandson is all about being a cowboy, and by definition, according to him at least a real cowboy, is a Garth Brooks singing cowboy. The image is from Precious Moments, and I pretty much let the image be the card. I hand printed the tag and used some twine to tie it all together. Never fear, I have another image all colored up to make my grandson a birthday card, but that will be another day.

Now onto the Any Hero cards. With this first one, I used my MTC program with my Cricut to make and cut the cutout star base. I then printed the "stripes" paper, a freebie, on vellum. The Word Art is from Paulette at Create with TLC. I tried a new technique for me, heat embossing a digital image. I printed the Word Art onto the dried "stripes" paper and embossed as soon as it came out of the printer. My suggestion is to have everything ready to go and RIGHT next to your printer. I trimmed along the stripes and circled around the Word Art and mounted the stripes onto the stars background and that onto a white card base(much easier for writing a note).

Any Hero Card No. 2 for the day, was based on a CAS sketch, where you printed the sentiment straight onto the card base and then added your matted designer paper(mine is from Paper Studio). I created the Word Art myself in PSE and then found this Heart in the MTC gallery. The latest version of MTC lets you save a cut file to a png file, so I imported it and overlaid my Word Art and printed the sentiment off onto my card base. Since things were just a little too white for me, I took my red fine pointed Sharpie and doodled around the outside edge of the front of the card.

Remember that I'm making the AnyHero cards with plans of making the Shrimp Boil guests write a note. Well a lot of the guests are going to be children, so I printed out this free image from the OWH Memorial Day Blog Hop, made it into a card using a sketch that I CASEd from Katie and using scraps from all my other Any Hero cards. I left the image uncolored so the children could do their own colorful interpretation and will take crayons and markers(no not my Copics) for them to use. I wanted this to be something all could participate in and how special will it be for one of our servicemen or women to read a note of thanks from a child. I have 72 blank Any Hero cards just waiting for a message and that's all for this round.

Thanks for stopping in and hope your day is filled with some crafty time.