Altenew Craft Your Life Kit Sweet Harvest for Sunday Stamps Challenge #389 and Just Us Girls Challenge #829

Happy Monday.

I hope you all had a great weekend. Today I am spending some time in my craft room trying to escape the insane heat! 100 degrees here today with a dew point of 77. Meaning it’s muggier here than in Miami right now!

I went looking for a little inspiration and challenges are always a great place to start. I found a fabulous sketch across at Sunday Stamps and combined that with the challenge across at Just Us Girls as it’s stencil week. I looked through my stash and found the perfect stampd/die and stencil set from my all time favorite Craft Your Life Kit from Altenew – Sweet Harvest. Seriously, this is by far my most favorite CYL kit!

As apples are the feature of this stamp/stencil set, I decided to go looking for some different colors to the normal green/yellow and realized that a group of Pink Ladies would be ideal. They used to be Lou’s favorite apple until he discovered Honeycrisp! I found a great photo and used that as my inspiration.

Here’s a sneak peek of my card:

Oh, I love those shades of RV pinks and yellow/orange!

Here’s my inspiration photo

And here are the challenge badges:

I began my card by stamping the image and then used the stencils to color the image. I used three different shades of green and 5 different shades of pinks/oranges/yellows. I really wanted to try to capture the different colors that are in the inspiration photo.

It took me ages to get just the right shading on the apples to try to give them a glow and take a flat shape and try to make it round! I spent quite a bit of time blending the colors together on the stencils before I was happy.

Once I was happy with the image I die-cut it with the matching dies and then used one of the background stencils that come with the kit to add a tone on tone background.

I backed my apples with another layer of die-cuts to give it a little lift from the background and then added a sentiment from The Ton Easy Expressions sentiment set. (One of my favorites btw!)

Before adding the sentiment I added some splashes of deep copper onto the apples and the background.

Here’s my full card:

I just love the color of the apples – they seem perfect for spring/summer! I know the talented teams across at Just Us Girls and Sunday Stamps would love it if you played along with their challenges!

I’ll be back tomorrow with another card. In the meantime, warm hugs and prayers for those of you who need a little lift tonight.

Card recipe:

• Stencils, stamps, dies: Craft Your Life Kit Sweet Harvest Altenew
• Sentiment: Easy Expressions – The Ton

Hugs