Welcome to my crafty blog. I used to love making daisy chains when I was small, and thought I’d go back to those days and make a card with one using Julie Hickey’s ‘sweet daisy’ stamp set. I decided to go for a bit of a different colourway, rather then the usual little white daisies you find in British gardens – I found a photo of an Osteospermum, or African daisy, which is a larger flower and comes in a variety of colours. These would be so much easier to make a chain with then the small white ones (which I discovered is properly called the English or lawn daisy). This blog is so educational!

Anyway, that’s enough horticultural musings – back to the card! I started by cutting a piece fo white card to fit on a slimline (or DL) card blank, and then stamped the single daisy a number of times. It’s a photopolymer stamp, so flexible, which helped with this design. I started by stamping the top three first, working from the left. I then re-bent the stem to stamp back across the card from the right, with the first flower sitting at the end of the row of stems, and the others then weaving across to sit below. (I hope that makes sense!)

The next step was to colour in the daisies. I wanted them to be nice and bright, so used my Perga liner pens with two shades of pink. Rather than go for full shading, I opted for strokes of each colour, just keeping the dark pink to the edge of the petals. I coloured the stems using dark green, with yellow and brown for the flower centres.

I added the sentiment from Julie Hickey’ s ‘positive wishes’ set, using ‘bottle’ Adirondack ink to match the colour of the stems.

I decided to add a butterfly as well to balance the sentiment, so stamped and die cut the smallest of Julie Hickey’s ‘layering flutterbies’, again colouring it with the Perga liners, using the same yellow and green as on the flowers. I then popped it onto the card using a foam pad.

I do love this set of daisy stamps – it’s so versatile. I’m going to share this card over at a couple of this week’s blog challenges, which helped to inspire it: Casology where the theme is ‘long’, and TicTacToe challenge, where I’ve picked up the bottom row of the grid (diecuts, flowers, slimline card).