Two Cards Inspired by A Perfect Evening

Yesterday evening, the hubs and I were sitting on our deck sipping wine (a delightful Argentinian Malbec blend) and reading books. We bought our house as much for the lot (1.75 acres) and the deck as the house. The covered deck is high above our back yard and faces east, which means that after noon, it's completely shaded and a wonderful place to sit and listen to birds and water babbling in the creek hidden by the vegetation on the right side of the yard.

It's our little bit of heaven on earth, really.

Please excuse the bare patches in the lawn. We put this lawn in last summer in drought conditions. Under the circumstances, it looks amazing. Hopefully by next year, it really will be amazing.

Anyway, we were sitting on the deck and a cold front started to move through from the west, with wind gusts up to 35 miles per hour. We were protected from the wind by the house, but the leaves all around us rustled continuously.

It sounded for all the world like ocean waves to me.

I love the sound of ocean waves. So relaxing. So peaceful. Right there in my back yard were forest bird calls (including a nesting woodpecker pair), leaves rustling, and waves hitting a sandy shore. Oh. My. Goodness.

So today, I made a couple of cards inspired by our evening on the deck.

First up is the breezy day. The sentiment is from A Muse, the tree from Papertrey (Through the Trees), the pair of leaves from Papertrey (Father Knows Best), and the grassy hill from Hero Arts (Horizontal Graphics, discontinued). The green is StampinUp's green galore, stamped both full strength and off-stamped to add some depth and sense of movement. The trunk and sentiment are stamped with SU Sahara sand.

To kick the card up a notch, I rounded two corners to add more sense of movement and randomly added glitter to leaves with a Quickie Glue Pen. Because GLITTER!!!

Now for the ocean. This Kate Chopin quotation is wonderful, and from Impression Obsession. I have had it for years and have no idea if it's still available. I wanted it to be the focal point of the card.

The ocean waves are a swish stamp from Hero Arts Horizontal Graphics (discontinued)...the same stamp I used for the hill on the tree card. I stamped it repeatedly in full-strength Memento Bahama blue and then inked, off-stamped (once or twice), huffed, and stamped on the card until I liked the results.

This was my second attempt. The first one got too busy-looking.

Note that I didn't round two corners here. There's plenty of movement on this card without rounding anything.

If you've stuck with me this long, I have a question to ask. Do you tend to stick to occasion cards, or do you at least occasionally make cards using whatever wonderful quotations or sentiments you have that suit your mood?

Neither of these cards is for an "occasion." I make very few of these types of cards anymore, mainly because so many of mine go to OWH and they generally want occasion cards.

I'll send the ocean card to my mother because she'll love it. The life's a breeze card will be harder to send...it'll have to go to someone who's experiencing good fortune. It can't go to OWH because of the glitter and because deployed service members aren't exactly experiencing life as a breeze, nor are their families.

How do you feel about this subject? Do you ever make a card just because or do you stick to occasion cards?



supplies are listed above under the cards