It's hot, hot, hot........

Our challenge for you at H2H this week is to use the word "hot" as your inspiration..... it can be an image, colors, whatever makes you think of the word hot.  I'm eager to see what everyone comes up with!

For me, the word hot is very relevent, as it's been HOT here in Northern Virginia!  To me, the best place to be when it's hot is sitting on the beach, toes in the sand, cold beverage and a good book in hand.  Unfortunately for me, I'm landlocked, with no beach nearby, so I thought I'd recreate a beach scene, so I can go there in my mind.  :-).  I wanted to try my hand at the brayer technique, since it's probably the one stamping technique I've not ever tried.  Splitcoaststampers.com has a wonderful tutorial on this technique.  It looks so easy!  You can see it here.  Well, let's just say I have some more practicing to do!  :-)  Of all the samples I attempted to make, this was the only one that even came close to resembling the image in my head. 

I created the sky by first cuting out a 1" circle, and temporarily adhering it to the top left corner of a piece of white cardstock (already trimmed to 6 1/4 x 4 1/4).  I used a piece of scrap paper, and covered up the bottom 1/3 of the cardstock, then inked up my brayer and ran it across the top 2/3 of the cardstock.  The circle acts like a mask, so when I was done rolling on the blue ink, and I took of the circle, I was left with a white circle.  I used the negative image of the circle (from the scrap that I punched it out of), and placed that over the circle, and sponged Sunflower ink and Autumn Terracotta in the open space.

I used Bamboo for the beach, and brayered that on the bottom of the card.  I used the Daydream stamp set to stamp the images on a scrap piece of paper, colored them with markers, and cut out the pails and the umbrella to adhere to the card (the "sand dune" was stamped directly on the card).  The sentiment comes from the special stamp set called "Pair-a-Phrase", which is only available from August 15-Sept. 30 (get it FREE with a qualifying order...more on that later!). 

OK, so I know we are our own worst critic, ad though I tend to be a perfectionist, I'm still pretty happy with how this card turned out.  Now I just need to figure out a way to get to the beach!  :-)

Hope you play along with us at H2H this week.  Our guest DT member, Debi, is playing along too, and wants some company!  :-)