Hello, lovely hexagons!

Have you missed me? I am just back home from a really wonderful family adventure. My husband and I were fortunate to be able to take our kids to Germany for the month of August (well, mostly Germany - we also spent three days in Prague). My cousin got married there on the 17th so we just decided to make a big event out of it! We had a fantastic time and I'm sure you'll be seeing the photos in some MDS projects coming up.

I'm looking forward to getting back to my stamps, but in the meantime I do have a card to share that I couldn't post before I left home. I thought I'd better hurry up and share it because the stampin' world is already moving on to fall and the holidays, and this card is neither of those things! My wonderful upline Nola Burkhard organized a swap for her team this summer. I had a lot of fun with this card and I can't wait to see what else my stampin' colleagues have come up with. Here's my card:

I was inspired by this card (the first one) and another non-SU card I saw on Pinterest that featured a group of hexagons. I used a lot of new products, but I wanted to mainly feature the Six Sided Sampler and Hello, Lovely stamp sets, neither of which I'd broken out yet. The colors are Strawberry Slush, Pool Party, Baked Brown Sugar, Early Espresso and white.

Banners are so hot and trendy right now, aren't they? They are fun to use, so I'm not quite sick of them yet. I used the mosaic DP pack, espresso dots from the Neutrals pack, Pool Party Core'dinations card stock (embossed with the honeycomb folder) and a debossed strip of brown sugar card stock, which I decorated with faux stitching to try to make it look like marker. For an accent I used the Simply Pressed clay tinted with Strawberry Slush reinker. These are really fun to play with, and if you haven't tried them yet, my big tip for you is this: after you put the clay in the molds, put the molds in the freezer. I think I was shooting for about 30 minutes, but I forgot one batch and left them in longer with no ill effect. The flowers always come out better than the buttons, so I recommend leaving the buttons in the freezer even longer. I still have trouble getting the buttons to come out perfect, but I won't give up!

Okay, I hope you will see me back posting regularly soon. Jet lag or not, the kids go back to school on Wednesday. The summer just flew by for us - I hope everyone out there enjoyed theirs and is ready to welcome fall!