Dace, Sing Love and afternoon tea at The Dorchester

It's time for our  new challenges at Stamping Sensations and Penny Black and More where our themes are 'In my Garden' and 'Things with Wings'. As always there are wonderful prizes to be won at both. I am also popping over to the Snippets Playground with the one below, the sentiment and Dragonflies are stamped onto a offcuts of Fabriano.

So it's Poppies for my first PB&M share, stamped onto a piece of Fabriano then carefully cutting round some of the Poppies I placed a die behind the cut sections so that I could cut the aperture with the blooms popping in front. Coloured in with sparkle pens and my all time favourite sentiment Dance, Sing Love stamped in black, foam pads added to the back of the front section and mounted over the sentiment. PB Polka Wings stamped twice, cut out, coloured and added to the finished card.

Yes, I do like an aperture and this one has been made in the same way as the top card, but this time using Crafty Individual's stamps who are our Stamping Sensation sponsor this month. I coloured in with a mixture of DI's and sparkle pens and added a few Dragonflies.

I have to confess that I am not overly fond of this card, it's one of the new PB stamps I bought from the Spring releases which I loved on the picture but once it was stamped out the appeal disappeared........it's not often I say that about a PB stamp. I used a watery DI mix to colour the background, stamped the image and coloured in with DI's, stamped the sentiment, it all looked a bit bland so I added some stenciled leaves.

Now on to afternoon tea at The Dorchester, the famous London hotel, no I didn't get to go 😦😢, but Anysia (left) and Azaria (right) above did! Alex and Zoe took them for a rather splendid treat for their Birthdays which are on the same date as each other.

Naturally, in true family tradition there had to be bubbles along with a Birthday cake complete with candle for each of them. It's rather scary to think that Azaria who is 21 starts her teaching career in September when she will be teaching English to 11 - 18 year old's and tiny as she is doesn't seem in the least phased by the prospect.

And Anysia has just taken a big leap with her boyfriend, they moved into their very first house a couple of weeks ago, along with a hefty mortgage which seems par for the course nowadays if they are to jump onto the property ladder.

And as for Alex and Zoe, well at the end of this month they are off to Europe along with their two dogs for a year or so. They have a fabulous new purpose built motor home and will be following their dream partaking in races across the continent. Normally they fly out to venues specifically for races, but now they will be driving following the race calendar, Alex runs 10K's and marathons and Zoe does ultra marathons which they got into when they were at Uni, which is where they met. We will so miss them and it's going to seem very quiet at times but if you have a dream you have to follow it otherwise you may always regret it as you get older.

Back to our new challenges and I hope you will pop over to the challenge blogs and see all the inspiration on offer from my team mates.

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