Its summer in Ulm!

Yes! After the long cold winter, summer has come early to Ulm! Since the beginning of June, we have been having sun and temperatures up to 30deg C! I’m already so tanned just spending late afternoons swimming in our neighbourhood lake, after the kids come out of school. Heres a pic of me and the kids… lol!

Yes we share the lake with a family of swans and they can get quite aggressive! Have a look at a funny video I took of them here.

So warm temperatures and blooming flowers inspired me to make this “mixed mediums” card, along with the gorgeous inspiration picture from the challenge at Time Out. I call it mixed mediums cause it has stamping, stencilling, heat embossing, embossing paste, die cuts, water colouring…!

If you follow my blog, you know I’m not really a mixed media person, but I have been looking at my own bookmark creations above, which have been sitting on my crafting table ever since I made them for my book club 2 months ago, and they are a constant reminder that my few attempts at it didn’t turn out too badly 😉  So I decided to try a mixed media card with as many mediums as I could fit in without it being too “heavy”!

I used the Stamplorations “Bloom Boldly” stencil. To colour in the leaves I used a sponge dauber and Stampin’ Up inks, and gold embossing paste for the flower. As I didn’t mask the leaves when adding the paste, I wasn’t able to get a smooth finish on the flower, but now it just looks like light reflecting off the petals… 😉 The dabs of pinks were added in by my Zig clean color real brushes.

For the Hummingbird, also from Stamplorations, I first stamped it on watercolour paper with Versamark and heat embossed it using Wow embossing powder. I then had a lot of fun colouring it with my Zigs! I fussy cut it and stuck it onto my card.

The “Love you” die cut from Xcut added the balance I think it needed on the left, along with the pink sequin.

So I hope you like my “many mediums” card and leave me a comment to let me know what you thought! Hope its heating up where you are too.

I’m playing along at:

 Time Out Challenges – Isn’t the inspiration pic gorgeous?

 Mixed Media Monthly challenge – Its their 3rd birthday and they’re asking us to use one of their past challenges as an inspiration! I went with #32 Put a stencil on it.

 Stamplorations Anything Goes Challenge

 Simon Says Stamp Monday challenge – Lets take a vacation…to a tropical place! I want to go home! 🙂

 Artistic Inspirations challenge – Anything goes with option of stamps or stencils…and I have used both!

 Dare2beArtzy – Summer