Vitamin ME!

We’ve got a new challenge going on at Power Poppy this month and it’s a bit of a refreshing break from what you’d expect!  Marcy’s calling it Vitamin ME!  This whole month we’re talking more about LIFE than solely cardmaking.  Marcy’s asking us some questions like, "what gives you joy, what feeds your soul?"  Answer those questions on THIS post at the Power Poppy blog and you could be in the running for a $50 Shopping Spree at the Power Poppy store!

Now, I actually DO have a card to show you today - but I will also show you something that feeds my soul later in the post...

My husband and I recently took a trip to Vancouver Island, just the two of us for a few days.  We LOVE the Island.  I’ve talked about that many times before.  This time we went to a new spot on the Island and had our first AirBnB experience at a gorgeous place in Sooke, BC.  The owner of this little spot has built some beautiful fairytale gardens all around the house.  BC has had quite a cold spring, and many things that normally bloom in early April,  weren’t blooming yet, but there were some lovely surprises; everything was beautifully green and some early flowers were popping up like forsythia, and another favourite of mine, lenten roses or hellebore.  

I coloured up this card using Power Poppy’s digital image - Hellebores inspired by some of the hellebores our AirBnB hostess had in her fairytale garden.  She even had a little vase of hellebores and forsythia sitting in a little vase on the counter to greet us when we arrived.  

This is the inspiration hellebore.  Isn’t that a gorgeous shade of deep purple - bordering on burgundy?  And noticed how the leaves have almost as much of that deep purple colour as they do green.  They were such a lovely find.  

I did a little out of the box cutting on the blooms to make it work in this stitched circle die.  I really tried to mimic as much of the colouring in the petals and leaves as I could.  I am actually missing the marker between RV93 and RV99 - so that makes blending with such deeply saturated colours a bit of a challenge.  But I used a tip from my Copic classes forever ago - I touched my RV93 marker to m RV99 marker - called tip to tip - and that blends the two shades a bit, so you get a bit of an inbetween blend of the two, so in a pinch it works!  The pretty sentiment is from Power Poppy’s set Vibrant Thanks, stamped in Memento Elderberry.  

Now for my Vitamin ME....I’ve hinted to quite a few things already that feed my spirit in this post.

• I get great joy from my time in creation.  Flowers, the mountains, the ocean - it all brings me life.  
• Since we live in in a very urban area in the middle of the prairie, sometimes that means we have to travel to get to some of those pretty places. We greatly value travelling because it never fails to give us renewed perspective and teach us new things, plus we get to enjoy the beauty of this amazing world.  
• I love capturing that beauty through photography, something I’m continuing to learn about.
• And this next photo is a former love of mine that feeds my soul - drawing!  This season I’ve decided to try some art/travel illustration in my journal to remember places we’ve been or experiences we’ve had in a symbolic way.  Now, I’m no Marcella Hawley, but it feels good - and it brings me joy to pick up a pencil and sketch again - then add colour with various mediums.  Here I’ve added Copic colouring to my inked illustrations from our trip to Sooke.  So there’s my Vitamin ME for this week!  

Here’s the rest of the crew with more Vitamin ME inspiration today....
Allison Cope
Christine Okken
Cindy Lawrence
Julie Koerber
Stacy Morgan
and Marcy at the Power Poppy Blog