Beautiful Bouquet

I’ve mentioned before that I always thought that I have the creativity of a brick and thus argued with my sister that I would not be able to make cards. I was wrong of course; Caro was right – anybody can make cards with the tools given to us by Stampin’ Up!. Even if you don’t feel able to design your own cards from scratch, there is so much inspiration to start you off. But I have a thing about flowers – if I’m given a bunch, I dump them in a vase and they arrange themselves. I feel that way with stamping. I love the two and three layer stamp sets with flowers and all the beautiful framelits but I feel challenged by them. So I decided to take the bull by the horns and play with the Beautiful Bouquet bundle. It’s a little bit of a cop out – there are no flowers stamped, but the card evolved this way.

I started by stamping these sweet flowers and also cutting them out from some sweet sugarplum card stock when it occurred to me that flowers are not identically coloured. So I grabbed a piece of watercolor paper and painted various strengths of sweet sugarplum on it and left it to dry. Actually I went to bed, but you don’t have to wait quite that long! Then I diecut half a dozen or so of the blossoms and I could see the card taking shape. The stems are cut from pear pizzazz and I stamped the sentiment (also from Beautiful Bouquet) in sweet sugarplum first. Just in case. Then it was a matter of construction. Since I was making it up as I went along, I hadn’t thought ahead and used the multipurpose adhesive sheets, so lightly dabbed some of the multipurpose glue onto the back of each die cut with a sponge dauber (on the silicone craft mat) making sure to vary the depth of colour. I also cut off single flowers and added a few where there were stem ends and also to add a little height to the bunch. I’m really thrilled with how it came out – although I know that I haven’t used the multi-step stamping on flowers yet. Baby steps, right?!

Since the blossoms were not full strength sweet sugarplum, the card looked better with a wide pear pizzazz border and just a touch of the sweet sugarplum card base showing. I really love this dusky rose – it was not my immediate favourite (that was dapper denim) but it gets used the most I think. It’s fascinating how your perception of the in colors changes as the year goes on. Except for flirty flamingo – I really don’t get on with that one! In fact, this year is the first time when I’ve really loved all five.

I hope you enjoyed today’s project.