First of all, I’m happy to announce that Stampin’ Up’s new Annual catalog is live! Have a look.

Today I’m going to feature two of the catalog’s new sets, Celebrate Sunflowers and Forever Fern.

I’ve always thought sunflowers were awesome and have wanted to grow some that are taller than me, which probably wouldn’t be that difficult. Unfortunately, I can’t even keep an aloe vera plant alive. Someday….. (sigh).

Recently I’ve been experimenting with painting bleach on paper with an aqua painter and I love the results. Painting with bleach is as easy as it sounds. I like to put the bleach in an aqua painter so I can keep it contained and it’s easier to control, but I suppose you could just use a regular paint brush and a small cup of bleach. Before you start, test the bleach on a small piece of card stock to see what the color fades to after the bleach does its work. It’s not always what you would expect. Also, you have to stamp with Staz-On ink; any other type of ink will fade along with your paper.

For this card, I stamped the leaves on a piece of Old Olive cardstock. The card base is one of the fresh new In-Colors, Bumble Bee. The tag is made from another product called the Lovely Labels Pick a Punch, which is one of my favorite new things because you can use it to make custom-sized labels in two different styles. The Celebrate Sunshine stamp set also has a companion die set called Sunshine Dies, which is what I used to cut the sunflower and leaves with.

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The next card I made uses the Forever Fern stamp set. I have some ferns growing beneath my deck and I haven’t killed them yet, mostly because they pretty much don’t need any help from me.

I stamped the leaves on a Just Jade (another new In Color) piece of cardstock for the background paper and applied bleach to the leaves, which surprisingly turned them light turquoise blue. I used the dies from the Forever Flourishing companion die set to cut out the black leaves, which I layered on top of the background piece.

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