"Friendship" Bread and Floral Fusion

So I have this friend. I'll change her name to protect the innocent guilty, so we'll call her... Mikki. Anyhow, this so-called "friend" of mine gave me a so-called "gift" a few weeks ago. This gift consisted of a gallon-sized ziplock bag of foul smelling runny dough... ah, the wonder that is Amish Cinnamon Bread. Took me right back to my college days where all my friends and I would take turns making this little Pyramid scheme of a bread that has a breeding cycle similar to rabbits. Are you not familiar with Amish Cinnamon Bread? First off, let's call a spade a spade and call this spade what it actually is - a DESSERT. Seriously, don't even bother counting up the amount of sugar that actually makes it into each loaf because it is just wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Deliciously wrong. It starts as stated above, when someone (who quite obviously wants you to put on a few pounds) gives you a bag of horrid smelling sour liquid and a list of instructions. Yummy. You leave the bag on your counter and supposidly smush it around every day (or forget half the days, as I generally do) for a few days, add some more ingredients (one of them being sugar) on the 6th day, continue smushing, and on the 10th day you pour it into a bowl and add more ingredients (yup, sugar). This leaves you with 5 batches of starter. You bake one of the batches and load the other 4 batches up into the ziplocks and deliver them to all the people who previously loved you to continue the cycle. Anyhow, this Mikki friend of mine gave us a bag which, unfortunately for my husband, was due to be baked while I was (conveniently) away at CHA. So, he bakes it all up with the help of a 5 year old and a 1 year old and at the end of it is left with 2 loaves of bread and 1 bag of starter. And then I came home. Leaving 4 bags of starter in a house... with me... who might be mildly OCD... and what do we have? (Can you see where this is going?) Well, so far we have 8 loaves of cinnamon bread, 1 loaf of butterscotch bread, 1 double chocolate bundt cake, 6 chocolate cupcakes, and 30 lemon-blueberry muffins. We will soon have 2 (or 4... depends on how ambitous I am) more loaves of lemon-blueberry bread. Yeah, it is *ridiculous* around here. Brian baked 2 loaves of bread for breakfasts, 1 baked 6 loaves for the small army of people who helped with the kids while I was gone, then came the cake to freeze for a family I'll be taking dinner to next week, and the muffins to freeze so I can take them to morning Bible study when it starts up again. The extra loaves will be just because one taste of the lemon-blueberry variety (with my own special additions, I might add) was enough for both Brian and I to forgive Mikki for the baking mess she got us into and for him to refer to it as "a little slice of heaven" so that obviously calls for more. (At this point, I feel compelled to confess that I am currently reading Julie & Julia by Julie Powell... it's altogether possible that the spirit of Julia Child herself has made me do all that I've done.) So, since it's Day 3 of the Witty Amish Cinammon Bread Bakeathon, I was beyond ready to break out the new PTI set I got at CHA. Ah, sitting and not baking... sweet relief. I've had this one in my head for a few days now. I love all the examples I've seen with this set and I wanted to try and bring a bit of a different feel to it. I used the long stem and straightened the stamp out a bit on the block first. I used a Versamark marker to ink up most of the stem and stamped it down on the card. That gave me the guide I needed for stitching. Have to admit, I'm kinda proud of that little idea! It's kind of like using invisible ink to mark fabric when sewing... the Versamark sort of disappears when you stitch over it. I stamped the flowers in Aqua Mist, Summer Sun, and I inked the 3rd flower first in Summer Sun, then in Berry Sorbet. I wanted a color that was vibrant but not quite so much as Berry Sorbet, so this is what I came up with. I was trying to come up with a way to add the sentiment but also fill up some of the empty space and ground the flowers a bit more, so I stamped the colored sentiment in the Sun/Berry mix, then drew a straight pencil line along the bottom edge of the sentiment and continued stamping it along the line with Versamark. I love how this sentiment kind of puzzles together! Repeated everything on the above two lines. I *loved* this card by Amy Rohla and am waiting on my Text Style set to get here, so I think I was trying to recreate that kind of Text Style look.

All right, everyone, if you've read this far, you deserve a medal or something! I'd give you one, but then I'd probably feel compelled to carve each one out of solid chocolate or something similarly time consuming (but probably delicious).

Thank You So Much Stamps - Floral Fusion (PTI) CS - Kraft, White (PTI) Ink - Aqua Mist, Summer Sunrise, Berry Sorbet (PTI); Versamark (Tsukineko) Other - sewing machine, circle punches (EK Success)