Hi everyone! Hope you’re having a great Memorial Day! The Hero office is closed today, but we’ll be open as usual on Tuesday.

Besides being a day of remembrance, Memorial Day has always meant the start of SUMMER to me — swimming holes are open, school is out, the weather is warm — well pretty hot here in Texas, actually — it’s supposed to get to 95 today, 100 with the heat index! So I thought I’d use our line of “summer” themed notecards and accessories for today’s cards, including Summer Notecards, Summer Mixed Gemstones, Summer Art Flowers and Summer Buttons! This color combo is not my usual thing — but once I got into it, I really love it. It really makes for some happy, cheerful — well yes, summery cards. Here are some samples!

Summery Circle Flowers

Here’s how to make the flowers — stamp the DesignBlock Flourish with orange chalk ink on Cantaloupe, then punch out two circles. Crumple up the circles, then unfold and scrape away some of the orange with your craft knife and use a paper distressor on the edges — mine is from Tonic. Hero Notecards (except for Kraft) are white inside, so when you distress them like this the white shows through.

Hello Birdie

For this one, I stamped the circle frames from some Sparkle Clear Little Letters in heliotrope pigment ink and embossed with clear Sparkle Embossing Powder on Wisteria. Each Sparkle Clear Little Letter comes with a unique frame — the ones shown here are from the I, N, J, A, P, and G. Those are the new Smooth Clear Gemstones — love them!

I stamped the bird once on a Clear Circle Tag with Black StazOn, and two times white cardstock, then I colored the cardstock birdies with pencils and cut out the body from one and the wing from another. I used a gluestick to adhere the body of the bird to the Clear Circle Tag, and then the wing with foam tape for a little extra dimension.

Hey, Summer!

I had some leftover of the stamped circle background so I went ahead and made this “half card”. The tag hanging off the side that you can’t really read says “a little birdie told me…”. I love using circle punches to create windows in cards.

From Our Home To Yours

Finally, here’s a fun card using punched circles outlined with Summer Mixed Gems, Summer Art Flowers and even a Summer Button!

And now to announce the theme of this week’s challenge — if you haven’t already guessed — it will be CIRCLES! Stamp up a card, scrapbook page, or other project using at least one circular element and at least one Hero Arts stamp. That’s it! Hope we get LOTS of entries for this challenge. Your circular element can be a button, punched image, and of course — a circle stamp! Post your entry to the Hero Arts Flickr Group by Sunday at 11:59 PM PST and tag it with the word “circles”. (See the FAQ for more info.) Here are the prizes:

1st place: $50 of new Hero Arts stamps + a 2008 catalog

2nd place: $25 of new Hero Arts stamps + a 2008 catalog

3rd place: $10 of new Hero Arts stamps + a 2008 catalog

I’m going hiking with friends today, but I wanted to do a summery giveaway! One lucky winner will receive all the goodies you see here that were used in the sample cards, including: Sparkle Clear Hello Birdie, Sparkle Clear From Our Home, Summer Notecards, Summer Mixed Gemstones, Smooth Clear Gemstones, Summer Art Flowers and Summer Buttons! YUM.

Just leave me a comment and let me know what stamping supplies you take with you on summer vacations. AND for an extra bonus share: if you could vacation anywhere in the world, where would it be? This would be a hard choice for me, I have so many places I want to go and so many supplies I’d want to take, hmmmm….!

I’ll moderate the comments when I can, can’t wait to see them! This giveaway will be open until Tuesday since so many people are out and about today. (Winners to be announced on Wednesday.)

Happy Memorial Day + Happy Summer! (And a Happy Fall to those in the southern hemisphere…!)

Filed under: circle

This entry was posted on Monday, May 26th, 2008 at 4:04 am and is filed under Motivation Mondays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.