Welcome to my crafty blog. Today;s card features one of the new ‘florals for you’ stamps by Julie Hickey. I love the clean lines of Julie’s stamps, and her recent online class gave me lots of ideas for using them.

I’ve based this card on two current blog challenges – the layout from Freshly Made Sketches and As You See It‘s theme. I’ve completed their sentence of ‘my favourite first flower of spring is…’ with a tulip. The ones in my garden are past their best now, but there was a beautiful display of them a few weeks ago. I’m also going to share it with Global Design Project, as it fits their theme of ‘birthday.

Before going any further, I have to give a shout out and thanks to the As You See It team, for choosing my card from their last challenge for an Honourable Mention. It was so lovely to see – here’s the link to that card birthday circles

Back to today’s creation – I started with Julie Hickey’s ‘birthday background’ which I stamped in black onto white card and then cut down into a banner shape. This was not the original plan – I had planned to mask off the banner outline on the card blank and stamp directly onto it, but I could not get the image to clearly stamp up to the edge of the masking tape (despite several goes), so gave up and cut it out instead.

I then stamped the tulip in Archival ‘shadow grey’ (I wish now that I’d used a darker shade for more impact) and coloured it with Distress oxides (‘picked raspberry’ and mowed lawn’) using a waterbrush. I used a Pergamano blending nib from Claritystamp fr the stem, as I find it difficult to colour fine areas with the brush. Once dry, I fussy cut it and them attached it to the banner using foam pads.

To finish, I stamped one of Julie’s ‘vertical sentiments’ down the side of the banner, and then added a few black Glossies around the tulip.

Tulips have a fascinating history, originating as a wild flower in the Tian Shan mountains on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan. Apparently they’ve been cultivated in the West since the sixteenth century, and were at the centre of ‘tulip mania’ in the seventeenth century when they became a prized commodity. It’s so interesting how different eras have their own fashion and trends – new varieties of tulips at that time were probably the equivalent of a new version of the iPhone being released today!