New techniques and inspirations

I hope you all had a fabulous holiday weekend. I am finally back on track and caught up with the laundry from being away. We spent the weekend at a lakeside condo complete with a pool for the kids to play in and of course the lake for my hubby to fish in. He actually caught a fish too! Jonathan went on his first "speed" boat ride and although it was a bit windy, I still think he had a good time. Tyler helped Daddy fish from the pier and I am sure he picked up valuable tips from our resident expert :)Reagan spent the entire weekend in the pool! I'm pretty sure that if it had been safe to sleep in the water, she would have!
As I said yesterday, I did finish a couple of cards. The "For You" card is for Monday's Try a new technique: find 3. I used spotlight for my technique. This was the first time I had tried this particular technique and I did like it, so I'll probably try it again in the near future. I used Chocolate Chip, Rose Red and Bashful Blue for my colors and watercolored the flower from fruit stand with Always Artichoke, Regal Rose, Rose Red, Close to Cocoa, and Bashful Blue ink.
The Happy Birthday Card is for Beate's Be Inspired Challenge. The dress was fabulous with so many colors to choose from. I actually had a hard time figuring out what I wanted to do. I definitely wanted to try to keep the scallop edges and drew most of my inspiration from the center of the dress. I used Pumpkin Pie, Mostly Mustard, Sage Shadow and Not Quite Navy. The flower is from the Simply Said set and I inked it with Sage Shadow and Night of Navy ink. I stitched the edge of the square sage piece with light green thread and then used a grey marker to make the holes appear darker and bigger.
Today is sketch challenge on SCS and they should be posting a new tutorial for a fun project as well. I will put a link to it here once they post it. Keep an eye on Kwerner's blog today as well, as she put up her color round up challenge for the week.
GH wasn't on Monday and I've not seen yesterday's episode yet, so we'll have to chat about the ins and outs of PC tomorrow.
Have a fabulous day everyone and thanks for visiting with me!