A brief visit to the beach

A couple of weeks ago, I asked Bruce if he would take me to the beach for a bit. I lasted 40 minutes. But it was long enough to breathe the wonderfully fresh ocean air, look back at the island and take a couple of pictures. This is what I saw and posted on Facebook:

From this spot, if you were to turn back towards the mountain (Mauna Loa), our home sweet home would be about 1,000 feet up, almost directly up from this beach. The drive is long as the highway must switchback and forth a few times because of the altitude. It takes about 20 minutes to get to this beach. In the mornings, we can see some of the ocean but our palm and banana trees have grown too tall for us to have a great view of the sea. But I'm not complaining!!!!

I decided to sponge a scene from memory using Memento inks and the little sponge daubers, and the palm tree stamps from one of Theresa Momber's sets. It's funny how we don't always remember exactly what we saw, but I tried to get a reasonably similar scene onto paper :)

I surrounded the image with gold metallic twine and glued black rhinestones to the corners. Must add coconuts to all the palm trees, covered them with Crystal Lacquer, and used white gel pen for waves and highlights. It's very sparkly because I got carried away with Wink of Stella (again). Those are teeny glass beads as sand and I used more Crystal Lacquer to hold them to the card. I hand wrote the location with a fountain pen, cut it out and sponged black around the edges. Adhesive foam behind the sentiment.

With much aloha - thank you for stopping by!!!!

Bruce brought home flowers for me!

Squeeee! After all these years, and it still gives me butterflies!

Here is a picture of the flowers, which looked way fuller with more lobelia the day he brought them home about 4 days ago. Guess I overwatered them?

I reached for the Koi watercolors and tried to capture a type of shape of this bowl of sweetness. I sketched it with regular pencil on Strathmore watercolor paper. I touched some of the centers with Liquid Pearls, added a twine bow and a few sequins.

Thank you so much for stopping by ♥

Silver Moon Ocean

I can't get enough of the ocean, or flowers, or animals :) But I do need to make a lot of ocean theme cards. This one is simple, black and white. I used water and Perfect Pearl (pearl) as a water paint and painted the moon through a negative die cut circle. I used the same Perfect pearls across the ocean for a silvery sheen on top of the blues of the ocean. White gel pen helped me make the waves. There are lots of aurora borealis color rhinestones, tiny rhinestones in the sky for stars, and rhinestone flourishes - lots of bling. I used some Crystal Lacquer on the palm branches for texture as well as on top of the breaking waves.

Thank you friends -- I appreciate you coming by!!!

Aqua Seas

It took a long time to get these next few cards completed.

First up is a colorful scene built on yellows and aquas, touches of purples and pinks, lots of pearls (hand colored each one as they used to be ivory), tiny rhinestones and Crystal Laquer for stars. I colored the tropical bird, covered it with VersaMark and heat embossed 3 coats of UTEE on it. Yes, you could probably use it as a pendant on a necklace, but I wanted to bring something special to the scene. It's flying over the beach.

Stamp Sets: "Aloha" and "Tropical Nature," both by Theresa Momber at Gink K. Designs
Inks by Memento; used sponge daubers to create the scene, and a negative from a label die cut to keep the scenery in.

I found an embossing folder that has the same shape as the die cut shape for the scene and it had embossing around the edges. I sanded the color off so you can see scroll work on the embossed layer.

I made the simple pin with pearls that is set into the triple bow. I cut and bent the end of the pin so that it won't poke anyone. Questions? Feel free to send them to me :)

This is a 5x7 card. The envelope took me all day to make. s-l-o-w.

3 coats of UTEE on the tropical bird, Crystal Lacquer on the boat, palm branches, coconuts. 

Wink of Stella all over the ocean. Mini rhinestones as stars, and some more Crystal Laquer, too.

Thank you, dear friends, for coming over and taking a look!!