So, I love pastels. My house is entirely made up of cool pastels. Some would (and have) called it the Easter Egg house, probably to tease me. I prefer the after-dinner mint house, but to each his own. After my foray into mint and pink with my baby card for my last post, I wanted to continue with the pastel trend this week. I’ve been playing along with #thedailymarker30day challenge, and these panels both were created during my (extremely therapeutic) daily coloring sessions. (If you haven’t been playing along, you totally should, because it’s amazing.)

This first project uses the stunning Always Cherry Blossoms set. One of my favorite elements of The Ton’s stamp sets is that they usually come with outline stamps in addition to the solid stamps, so you can do as much or as little work as you like. Coloring is one of the things I do to relax, so I obviously opt for the line drawn option as often as possible. I started by heat embossing that lovely cherry blossom branch using The Ton’s Rose Gold Embossing Powder. (I seriously want to rose gold all the things, specifically rose gold all the flowers! That EP is fabulous.) I added a few cherry blossoms gently floating down the card front. After all of the floral heat embossing was finished, it was time to do some watercoloring. I used Distress Inks in Spun Sugar and Cracked Pistachio for the watercoloring. The background was done a littler differently, with my Twinkling H2o pearlescent watercolor pots. It has such a pretty pinky, minty sheen in real life. (Insert heart eyes here!) Once I had finished that, I heat embossed the sentiment from Bokeh Burst Round onto some vellum, again using the Rose Gold EP, then fussy cutting and popping it up. A few sequins (Glass Slippers, Pastel Pink, and Wedding Dress) finished it off.

For my next project, I stamped one of my absolute favorite stamps from The Ton: Floral Border, again using the Rose Gold Embossing Powder. In order to combat the somewhat splotchy finished product when heat embossing on watercolor paper, I went over the solid flowers with my Versamark pen and filled in the splotchy sections. Easy peasy. I colored the flowers in three different shades of pink using my Zig markers and a wet painbrush, then coloring in the leaves with shades of dark teal. I then shaded the entire panel with my Cool Green Shadow Zig marker. I love the kind of shabby chic feel the pink and mint and rose gold have. Plus, this gorgeous Floral Border stamp does all of the hard work of masking and layering to create that marvelous border for you.

Now, for the greeting. I didn’t want to cover up any of that pretty minty center, nor did I want to cover any of the pretty pink peonies… so my solution was to die cut the “fabulous” right from the watercolored panel. I ended up die cutting the word four times, once with the watercolored panel, and three more times from mint green card stock, in order to glue them together to create a dimensional die cut. The “get well soon” and “friend” were from the Basic Labels set and stamped with Cosmopolitan Pink ink. I laid down my dimensional die cut within the die cut of the watercolored panel, then popped up the labels with dimensional adhesive. The last step was to add some Rose Gold, Dusty Pink Matte, and My Tutu sequins.

Here they are together. Nothing quite so pretty and feminine as pink and mint together, eh? And the combo with Rose Gold…. well, it’s just so lovely. Happy August! (BTW- holy moly it’s AUGUST. Where did the summer go!?) I hope you enjoyed these pretty, summery projects! Have a fantastic week! 🙂