Catching up

Oh, my!  I had no idea it had been so long since I made any posts on this blog until I looked this morning!  You would think that in these stay-at-home days I would be posting every day.  I certainly could have, given how many cards I've been making and mailing.  My biggest problem is that I am not a photo person so I miss many an opportunity to take a picture and post it.  That has always been one of my big weakesses.

In the past month I have made a mailed off about 50 cards.  When July came along I found quite a long list of friends with birthdays in this month, so I began making cards like mad this past week, many of them using new stamp sets I recently received.  But I am getting ahead of myself in a way.

I started the month off making an especially July-friendly card.

See what I mean?  Doesn't the watermelon make you think of July 4th???  I'll be mailing it this week to a friend.  I recently became acquainted with Crafty Hazelnut's Patterned Paper Challenge and have enjoyed following it.  I am going to submit this watermelon card for that July challenge.

Another thing I think of in July cards is butterflies.  We have a bush of lantana (is that how you spell it?  Not sure) in our back yard.  It is full of bright yellow blossoms and there are huge yellow and black butterflies that come every day to drink from those blossoms.  My butterfly card is not yellow but I am very pleased with it anyway!

Several weeks ago I "happened" onto a new-to-me stamp company that has captured my heart .. Honey Bee Stamps.  They have such cute bee-inspired stamps and dies.  Just to prove to you how cute, take a look at these little bees on the two "beeday" cards I made this week!

Aren't those little bees the cutest things?  Too bad they aren't that cute in real life!  More coming from that stamp set for sure!

I also got a new stamp set from my other current "most favoritest" company (I love you, Simon Says Stamp!) that I used for another birthday card going out this coming week.

I used colored pencils to color the row of houses and the airplane with the banner (and the sun in the sky), then popped the plane and banner up on foam tape.  Even though the front of the card says "Thinking of you," the inside is a birthday message.