It’s here for sure!  Super Bowl Weekend is here with the game tomorrow! Here is a Football Card For Super Bowl LI in Houston, Texas. The city of Houston is so excited to be hosting the Super Bowl this year and LOTS of activities have been going on all week! More and more celebrities are arriving for parties and events, a big concert tonight with Taylor Swift, all kinds of media from around the world, and Houston is spruced up for the big day!

Of course a Stampin’ Up! cardmaker has to make a football card to commemorate the big occasion! The card base is Chocolate Chip with a Garden Green layer for the field. I cut very narrow (1/8″) strips of Whisper White cardstock and glued them down for the lines on the football field.  The Stampin’ Up! Grid Paper was very helpful in getting the first one centered and the rest spaced evenly.

The football was really easy to make, easier than I thought it would be!  Just use a Circle Punch!  I happened to use a 2″ Circle Punch but you can use any size you want, depending on what size you want your football to be. Just punch the circle, then put it back in the punch part way until you see a football shape (looking at the punch from the bottom) and punch again. The make the stitching on the football I just cut very thin strips again of Whisper White. For the curved bands at the end, I used the Circle Punch again. If you have the Layering Circle Framelits Dies and Big Shot you can die cut any size footballs you need!

I always think it is fun to use my Layered Letters Alphabet Stamp Set! I stamped the words “Super Bowl LI” in several colors, close together, hoping they would fit on the card some way. I didn’t know if I would cut the letters apart or how I would do it, so sometimes you just have to play. Luckily I figured out the layout of the words pretty easily on my card! Sometimes there is more trial and error!

Did you learn your Roman Numerals well in school? I wonder if they even teach Roman Numerals any more.  I always thought it was fun and “got it” pretty easily. Seems like we used to have to write out all the Roman Numerals to 100 or 500 or 1000, whatever it was!  I can still see my writing in pencil on the “newsprint” paper we used to use a lot in elementary school! Anyway, this year with the Super Bowl being number 51, the Roman Numeral LI is a little odd looking I think.

If you don’t have a ticket to the Super Bowl in Houston tomorrow, maybe you can be inspired to make some football or any sports cards and keep them on hand for birthdays or congratulations for a special game or whatever occasion. I heard on the news yesterday that some lady was in the audience for a press conference or something with Roger Goodell and actually asked if he had extra tickets for his suite! He spoke to her afterwards and she and her husband are going to the Super Bowl game!!!  She said it never hurts to ask!  Holy Cow!

I hope you enjoy all the Super Bowl hoopla this weekend and try making some sports cards for your stash like this Football Card For Super Bowl LI in Houston, Texas!

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Yesterday we woke up to rain that was forecast, but as it turned out, it continued to rain over the same area of Houston. And when rain does that in Houston, flooding occurs. The path was from just a little southwest of us in Sugarland, up the freeway into downtown and beyond.  So it was a morning of local TV stations broadcasting continuously regarding flooded areas and streets and school delays and showing alternate routes around the flooding. I don’t think we could have gotten out of our neighborhood very easily so my husband didn’t leave for work until almost lunchtime. We got a little more rain in the afternoon but nothing like overnight. Today there was even more rain this morning, but somehow it didn’t cause flooding, thank goodness, because today I had to go for an appointment! I only came across one huge puddle which probably yesterday completed flooded the highway access road I was on.

Because of two rainy days in Houston, I thought a rainy day card was in order, using the Beautiful You Stamp Set. One image has the lady with an umbrella.  Perfect! I sponged on some gray clouds in the sky with Smoky Slate ink with a piece of the Stamping Sponge. Then with one of the squiggly stamps in the set, I stamped rain puddles with  Marina Mist  by stamping off first on scrap paper so the color would be lighter. I actually like the way the puddles turned out!

If there is one thing I think you should buy from the Occasions Catalog, it would be the Watercolor Pencils! I love these and they are so easy to use!  Just barely color in, scribble if you like, then blend with the Blender Pen which smooths it all out! I colored in the lady’s clothes in this way.

To jazz up the card a little, I paper-pieced the umbrella.  That means I stamped the umbrella part of the stamp on a piece of designer paper and then cut it out. A very easy technique for something a little different. It just adds a little interest!  I thought this Houston lady, out in the rain, should look snazzy with her colorful umbrella!

What a great way we have to express ourselves with stamps, ink and paper! We can even make a card for a rainy day – and other than maybe baking chocolate chip cookies, what else is better to do on a dark and gray rainy day than to stamp?!

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To celebrate the first day of fall I had to break out my Sheltering Tree Stamp Set that I hadn’t used in awhile. Well, fall begins at 9:20 EDT I think I heard!  I guess at that moment all the trees in my neighborhood will change their leaves to fall colors and the temperature will drop about 30 degrees this afternoon!  Maybe in Houston we need it to drop 40 degrees to get that crisp autumn feel!

What do you enjoy the most about fall?  The cool, crisp air?  The colored leaves? Halloween coming?  I wish I could zap myself right now to somewhere cooler that has colored leaves! Those of you who have colored leaves now or coming can count yourselves lucky!

Sheltering Tree is an all purpose stamp set!  You can stamp the leaves on the tree to be any season you want.  Make them all one color or do like I did and use Stampin’ Write Markers randomly to apply several colors. Then I stamped again with yellow in case I missed any spots.  The set comes with a small stamp of leaves so I used that to put a few leaves on the ground to be raked up with the cute little rake stamp!  The grass can be stamped with just the solid swoosh piece or the individual blades of grass.  I used both.  You also get several nice greetings in the stamp set.  The card base is Garden Green with a layer of Pumpkin Pie.

Enjoy your first day of fall!  Go jump in a pile of leaves! Or stamp something with fall colors!

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Today is the first day of summer or Summer Solstice and I thought what seems more summery than sitting outside on a porch swing and sipping iced tea or lemonade! This First Day of Summer Sitting Here Porch Swing  Card expresses that perfectly with the Sitting Here Photopolymer Stamp Set and a little coloring. The images are just stamped with Basic Black Archival Ink and colored in with Stampin’ Write Markers and maybe a little help from my Aqua Painter and Blender Pen.

There are no mistakes in stamping, as they say, so I will admit that when I stamped the flower pot, it didn’t stamp completely since it was new.  I should have stamped with it several times to get it conditioned first. SO I just stamped it again on a scrap paper and cut that out and adhered it right over the original flower pot!  I even colored in the one on the card front a little bit in case any of it peeked out around the cut version.  Then I popped up the flower pot on a Stampin’ Dimensional so it would  be 3D.  Very cute!

You can’t really see how the pillows turned out in this photo, but they are very cute! If you stamp and color the pillows and cut out, place them stamped side down on a foam mat and take the top end of the Aqua Painter or a stylus and run it around and around on the backside of the pillows.  This makes them poof out a little bit and you can put a Stampin’ Dimensional underneath and they look like real pillows on the porch swing.

I think today is hardly the first day of summer here in Houston, Texas. It was even hotter last week! I don’t know how people out west in Phoenix and other places can take any more heat than we have here! A flight from Houston couldn’t even land in Phoenix yesterday because the temperature was too high and apparently airplanes can’t land or take off when the temperature hits 120!  I never heard that before. I remember landing in Phoenix to change planes at least once and having to pull down all the window shades so the heat wouldn’t get in the plane any worse than it was.  But it wasn’t 120 degrees that day.

I hope you are enjoying your first day of summer and sipping some cool drink on a pretty porch swing like on my First Day of Summer Sitting Here Porch Swing  Card.

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Luckily I remembered I had seen a bee stamp in this Garden in Bloom Stamp Set, and it came in handy after we had a swarm of bees come visit on Sunday!  We’ve never had that happen before, although we have seen distressing stories on the news about people with huge swarms of bees and honeycomb in the walls of their homes dripping honey. A house down on the corner had bees and we saw a beekeeper there at least twice and some repairs being done on the house! I guess swarms of bees are common, but we just haven’t had the pleasure yet until this weekend! Fortunately, we saw the swarm on the front of the house and caught it early so they wouldn’t have made a big honeycomb yet in the wall or wherever they are!  At least that’s what we think!

So even bees can be an inspiration for a card, as most of nature can be! This Garden in Bloom Photopolymer Stamp Set is sticking around and you will find it in the new Stampin’ Up! Catalog on page 146.  The greeting is from the stamp set And Many More, which I deeply regret to say is retiring May 31.  It is still available right now as I write this and at a discount! Check out the sayings that come in the set and see if you “need” it for your word collection!
A week from today will be the first day of the new Stampin’ Up! Catalog! Be sure to shop the Retiring Products if they are still available.  Last day is May 31. Remember, you can’t mix old and new, so get any retiring products by May 31 and then you can place an order from the new catalog beginning June 1st. It is an exciting time!  Just like having a swarm of bees is an exciting time, in a different way! Bees are actually pretty interesting! Anything that inspires a handmade card like this Garden in Bloom Bee Card can’t be all bad, right?!

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