Welcome to my crafty blog. Today I’ve been playing with the ‘painted poppies’ set from Stampin’ Up! I do love poppies and I think they work well on sympathy cards, which is what I’ve done with this one. I’ve taken inspiration from a couple of this week’s challenges for the card: I’ve used the theme in the photo over at Fusion (having picked up the sketch for yesterday’s card), together with the colours from Just Add Ink which I thought were perfect for poppies.

I started by stamping three poppies onto a piece of white card and drew the stems using a micron pen, as the stamp set just has the flower heads. The one on the left went a bit wonky, but I decided I could disguise that when the leaves, etc were in place!

Next was to add the leaves onto the stems and then colour the image. I used the infill stamp for the flower heads, with Artistry Ink in ‘blaze’. I thought it was a bit large for the two smaller ones, so cut a mask using a sticky note – I cut it out fairly roughly, weaving in and out around the image so the colour replicated the style for the large one. I then filled in the leaves using ‘elegant emerald’ and a waterbrush – again I did this quite roughly so it kept with the same style.

I then used the two splatter stamps in the set to fill in around the flowers using ‘blushing rose’ ink. Once dry, I mounted it onto a piece of black card and popped it on a 5×7 card blank.

To finish, I stamped the sentiment from ‘flourishing phrases’ onto a piece of black card and heat embossed it using WOW ‘bright white’ superfine powder. I cut it out with a banner die and it then sat neatly across the flower stems (hiding my wonky one!)

It’s been another lovely sunny day here, but I’ve barely been out of the house thanks to a stream of online meetings – so much for retirement! I’m excited though, as the decorator is arriving tomorrow to completely refresh my spare bedroom/office – although the downside is that I’ve now got to spend the evening clearing the rest of the furniture, etc, out of there. No pain, no gain though, as Jane Fonda once said. See you tomorrow.