Isn't it almost time?...

for chocolate and pink???  Well, a girl can dream, right?!

Spring is one of my most favorite times of year -- trees aglow in various shades of pink, with their contrasting brown trunks -- SOOO beautiful to me!  But, perhaps that's because I happen to LOVE chocolate and pink together.  Check out my baby girl's room. :) 

Oh yeah, onto the card at hand! :)  At my next techniques club, we will be playing with the water color wonder crayons, and this is one of the cards we will be making.  This is the "direct-to-stamp" watercoloring technique.  Start with cutting out a watercolor paper panel using the Labels Framelits.  I spritzed the tree stamp (from Lovely as a Tree stamp set) with water -- make sure your stamp is fairly damp, but no puddles of water.  Now, take your watercolor crayons of choice and color directly on your stamp -- you want the crayon to glide easily, but not have pools of excess water.  Once you've colored to your heart's content, lightly spritz your stamp again and stamp onto your watercolor panel -- letting the stamp hang out for a second so the paper will absorb the moisture from your stamp.  This technique takes some playing with to figure out the right amount of water/crayon ratio -- too much water results in a blurry muck, too little water, and the image won't transfer.  As "picky" as it is, I urge you to keep trying, because once you get a feel for the right balance, you'll reach for this technique again and again because it gives you such intensity of color!

For the fancy layers on the bottom half of the card, I used my edgelit dies.  I've finally worked out a great, easy way to use them -- take a (preferably new) extended cutting plate, and cut SU grid paper to the same size as the plate, and adhere that to the bottom of the plate using double sided tape.  On the top of the plate, fasten one edgelit to each end of your plate, using a glue dot or tiny pc of sticky strip at the far edges of the edgelit.  Line up your edglits with the grid lines you can see through the plate.  Now, just slide your card stock under your edgelit and cut -- lining up your card stock with the grid lines, as well.  Gives you a perfect even cut every time!  Yeah!  Now I actually like these things. (Gasp! did I really just say that?)  As you can see, I staggered the pattern on the different layers so that they would layer together more uniquely.  Again, easy to do when your paper stays put and doesn't slide around like a fish on a cutting board.  (Note: I saw the idea for using the cutting plate with the grid paper under it, on some dear demo's blog, but can't for the life of me find it now, so apologies to whoever's brilliant idea it was that I haven't given credit to!)

Colors used here: Regal Rose, Chocolate Chip, Whisper White, Rose Red

I hope that you, too, will give the edgelits another try! :)

Happy Spring!