Firstly I’d like to thank Sam aka Pootles for selecting my card as her weekly winner – her blog is one of the few that I read each morning before I get out of bed and it was a great start to a Saturday.

When I got home from work yesterday, my Paper Pumpkin had arrived! So I got up this morning determined to make my first Paper Pumpkin September 2016 Alternate! It’s going to be very useful because soon I’ll be getting together with a friend and her son to bake cookies for a charity stall and we like to add fun labels. This set is perfect!

I quickly decided that I wanted to make a very CAS card using the “A Happy Hello to you” sentiment  along with the sunflowers. I started with black centres but eventually changed to early espresso which looked better with the delightful dijon than chocolate chip. My grid paper is now covered in an assortment of sunflowers! After all that testing on white, I changed the top layer to very vanilla because it’s warmer. I wanted to add a pop of colour and watermelon wonder fits the bill – I stamped the sentiment and then used my layering squares framelits dies to cut it out and create a little frame. The layering dies are really great for creating different sized borders. Next was the placement of the flowers – I held my sentiment in place and figured how much of the flower needed to be seen and then removed the sentiment and stamped.  I popped the sentiment up with dimensionals. Then it was a simple matter of an early espresso skinny mat (it’s 1/8 inch larger than the very vanilla piece) and a wider than usual band of the card base showing. It’s fun playing with different sized mats; admittedly because I don’t tend to have a lot of layers there’s less scope, but it’s amazing what a change of 1/8 or 1/4 inch can make.

So there’s the first Paper Pumpkin September 2016 Alternate, I’m off to go and make the second one now.

See you tomorrow,

Liz