Welcome to my crafty blog. I’ve got a bright anniversary card to share with you today, using Stampin’ Up!’s ‘art gallery’ stamp set and the matching ‘floral gallery’ dies. I’ve combined three of this week’s challenges into the one card – the gorgeous photo over at Time Out gave me the colours and floral theme, the layout is from the sketch at Fab Friday and the occasion is courtesy of Alphabet challenge who are now back at ‘A’ with ‘Anniversary’.

Before we go any further, I want to say a huge thank you to the team at Alphabet, who chose my deerscape card as one of their top 3 winners for their ‘Zoology’ theme!

Anyway, on to today’s card. I started with a 5×7 card blank, and then embossed a piece of white card with the SU ‘textured paint’ folder. I trimmed it down so I had a border on both sides, and cut it in half as it was a bit shorter than the card blank. I attached the two pieces at the top and bottom of the card blank, as I knew the gap would be covered by the rest of the layout. Next was to die cut an oval into the centre of a piece of turquioise card, which I’d cut to teh same width as the embossed pieces. I popped a bit of white card behind the oval and then attached that to the card front.

The next step was to stamp out the flowers. This little floral spray is a single stamp, so I used a great tip from Joanne James (The Crafty Owl) to get the flowers in a different colour from the leaves & stems. I stamped the image twice, once in ‘peacock feathers’ Distress Ink and then in ‘picked raspberry’, die cut it out in both colours, and then trimmed the pink flowers off before gluing them on top of the turquoise spray.

I finished by stamping ‘happy anniversary’ from Claritystamp’s ‘essential sentiments’ set onto the white oval in the ‘peacock feathers’ and then popped the flowers next to it using foam pads.

I really like the ‘art gallery’ set and suspect it will be making regular appearances in this little blog!