This week, I received the final book in my design team round robin. It belongs to dear friend Corinne Stubson, with whom I’ve done many creative projects—and with whom I share a love of gardening. Long before I started the overhaul of my own garden, I sighed over photos of Corinne’s, which is truly a work of art. Since Corinne’s book is all about color, I decided that my work would focus on this shared love. And, since I spent the majority of my spare time this week working on my garden, I was feeling all sorts of inspiration!

I have an ever-expanding collection of floral paper punches. I just can’t resist them. I’m always looking for reasons to justify using them—and I didn’t have to look far in this book. I decided to do a layout using dozens of punched flowers to create a sort of paper garden. I painted a rainbow background, then punched and glued. Even though I used dozens of paper flowers, the layout still looked sparse, so I tried doing some leaves and stems with green Sharpie. That still wasn’t quite it, so I grabbed a white correction pen, and dotted in more tiny flowers in the empty spaces, and when I looked at the layout this morning, I was finally very happy with it.

I’m really looking forward to doing more work in this book. It couldn’t have arrived at a better time, since right outside my window, the newly planted section of the front yard garden is already starting to bloom.