I had originally planned for this to be at least a two-part blog post, but the weekend proved busier than I expected. Friday our niece, Grace, graduated from the University of Buffalo. She is a fabulous artist, and spent one semester in Florence, Italy studying art, but her major is accounting. She's ready now to start studying for her CPA license which turns out to be quite an involved process. This summer she'll be interning here in Rochester with a large accounting firm. We celebrated with a party in Buffalo Friday night.
Her brother was here from Oregon, and her sister from Vermont, so I thought a family photo was in order.
Here's the card I made to celebrate this big event. It's a close copy to one Nicole Heady created for the release of this stamp set.
UB's colors are gray and blue. I tried to make it a bit more feminine by adding a couple of rhinestone starrs. All the stamps are from Papertrey Ink's For the Graduate. Once every year or so I'm very glad to have a nice graduation set.
Unexpectedly, we got a break in the rainy weather Saturday afternoon. It was chilly, but sunny, so we headed to the Lilac Festival to grab a sandwich for our dinner. I was wrong in my earlier post, there aren't 500 bushes, but 500 varieties of lilacs on over 1200 bushes! Here are a couple more shots now that the lilacs are at peak.
While we were at the graduation party Matt arrived for the weekend. We had a nice visit on Saturday. Sunday I hosted a brunch after church for Tracy's mom and sister and her family. Matt, Skylar, and Betsy came to visit as well.
I served Deb's Egg Boats—always a big hit.
And Hummingbird Cupcakes for dessert.
Here's Miss Skylar.
And with Betsy.
I had a lot of fun making Mother's Day cards, and used a template from Rebecca Cooper at Simple As That to make some bookmarks for Sarah and Betsy. I don't think Betsy is a big reader, but Sarah certainly is, and they were too cute not to do. Both women loved them.
I recently acquired a few Gelatoes from Faber-Castell that I wanted to try out. The flowers & leaves on Betsy's card was colored with some of the metallic Gelatoes with shading done with the Faber-Castell markers. I'm not a convert yet, but I'll be giving them another try or two soon. I couldn't get a photo that showed the sheen of the metallic Gelatoes.
The flower and leaves are from Papertrey's "Friends Til the End" set, and the sentiment from the stamp set included with May's card kit from Simon Says. The ribbon is ages old from my stash.
My mother-in-law's card was made with a fun product from the card kit as well.
This embossed card front panel came with the kit. I backed it with a dotted paper by A Muse, and added more flowers from Papertrey's "Rosie Posie." A bottle of pink Perfect Pearls was also in the kit, and I used it to add centers to the embossed flowers.
Sarah's more a fan of clean and simple, but all the stamps for her card also came in the May kit. I love the sketched banner, and have seen several cards around blogland where stamps like these are overlapped. The papers are all from Papertrey Ink.
One of the things I like about the Simon Says kits is how versatile they are. These are all quite different cards, and yet many of the supplies came from the one kit.
I hope you had a fabulous Mother's Day! Betsy celebrated later in the day with her family, and Matt, Tracy, and I had dinner on Consesus Lake. When we made the reservations, we were hoping to eat outside, but there was actually snow in the air for a few minutes yesterday. But I got my required mother and son photo after dinner before the weather turned nasty again.
Thanks for sticking with me on a rather long, photo-heavy post. I have one more post to go up before we leave tomorrow, and one scheduled while we're away, but it's likely to be very quiet here for the next two weeks.
