Understand Blue: Now Playing in My Garden + DTGD Sneak Peek

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I weeded for an hour this morning and the heat is intense. Our heat index is supposed to be 120 today. that's a first for Austin. I'm totally acclimated and it really sucks the life out of you. You have to be super careful, because hyperthermia sneaks up on you and is very deadly. So even though I got out early, I was sapped after sweating buckets for an hour. 69% humidity makes it pretty horrendous.

However, I'm in a fight for all the beautiful plants in my yard this year and I'm going to win. I was inspired to make a few cards based on what's happening in my garden right now. This is a list of what's blooming:

Butterfly bush (inspired card #2)
Bee balm - a hot pink and a lavender
Blue, purple & red sage plants
Shrimp plants - two red varieties and two yellows
Yellow & white Lantana
Blue plumbago
Garlic Chives
Echinacea
Devil's Trumpet

Aside from my two shrimp plants though I realized that the real hole in my color spectrum is yellow, so I'm going to have to fix that.

Too hot to do anything not on paper though, so I came up with maybe an unexpected color combo for this beautiful layering stencil today - I used Gina K. Inks for this beauty - all listed below. The sentiment is from this set. I am living my garden dream this year - if I can get them through this excessive heat spell!

The next card is inspired by my butterfly bush - after the freeze, the recommendation was NOT to prune anything - just let it come back uninjured and that was great advice - this year I kept a journal of the dates each plant started to emerge, because I have a feeling these extreme weather events are here to stay - and I need to know how long to wait. Plants that are allowed to come back from freezes are MUCH hardier and more likely to survive long term so it's important not to rip out something that looks dead. Just be patient.

As a result of that, some of my plants got leggy right out of the gate - notably my oregano and the butterfly bush. The butterfly bush was SO leggy I didn't even see it had bloomed because the bloom was buried way out in the grass! But it's beautiful!

So I used this curvy layering butterfly die to do a little trick you will see at Dare to Get Dirty, which takes place in July, and I can't wait!

The background was made with this cover die.

Here are all the supplies I used

Layering Roses [ CRF ]	Curvy Butterfly [ CRF ]	Sentiment set [ CRF ]
Cover Plate Die [ CRF ]	Prickly Pear [ GNK ]	Wild Dandelion [ GNK ]
Warm Cocoa [ GNK ]