Welcome to my crafty blog. I’m now busy making Mother’s Day cards, which will be celebrated here in the UK on 14 March. Mothering Sunday is a Christian celebration on the 4th Sunday of Lent and was traditionally a day for people to return to their mother church, usually the one where they had been baptised. Since the 1950s, it’s been merged with the American celebration of Mother’s Day (although that’s marked in May in the US). Today’s card has the traditional sentiment of ‘Mothering Sunday’ on it.

I have to say, this was not a particularly quick card to make! I started by cutting the Claritystamp ‘art nouveau tulips’ die into a piece of white card. I’d put ‘Stick It’ on the back of the card before cutting it, so it would be easy to stick the die cut down. Once cut, I carefully lifted the image off, trying to leave all the small individual pieces in the die, as I wanted some of them later. Those few pieces that did pop out of the die I kept on a piece of paper so they didn’t go in the bin by mistake!

I attached the die cut to the front of an A5 card blank and then turned my attention to filling in the flowers with the small pieces still in the die. This is definitely a good card to make if you like doing jigsaw puzzles! I wanted the flowers to stand out against the white die cut, so decided to use Distress Oxides to colour each piece, rather than recut the die in different colours. I used a blending brush and coloured each piece in turn as I added them into the card – ‘tattered rose’ for the petals and ‘bundled sage’ for the leaves.

Helpfully, each of the small pieces already had adhesive on the back from the original piece of card, so they were easy to add into the die cut once coloured. I do like this effect, but as I said earlier it wasn’t a quick process.

Next step was to add the sentiment below the die cut. This is an old wood-mounted stamp that I’ve had for quite a few years. I stamped it with WOW clear embossing ink, and then heat embossed it using WOW ‘gold satin’ powder.

I finished the card by cutting a narrow white frame, using the Claritystamp nested rectangle dies, which I then glued in place around the die cut.

I love the delicate colours that the ink has given to the tulips in this card. I’m going to be sharing it over at this week’s Color Throwdown challenge, which inspired the shades I used.