Welcome to my crafty blog. I’ve spent the day at a flower show today and treated myself to some lovely metal poppy seed heads for my garden. They really reminded me of Claritystamp’s ‘funky foliage’ aperture die, which I haven’t used in ages so thought it was time for an outing.

I started by cutting the die into smooth white card, trimmed it down with a narrow broder and attached it to the front of a 6×6 card blank. I’d fortunately remembered to put ‘Stick It’ on the back so the die cut was adhesive which makes life so much easier!

I’d kept all the small ‘waste’ bits in the die (Barbara Gray calls this ‘trap the scrap’), as I wanted to paper piece the flowers and leaves. This took a little while, but I used alcohol marker pens to colour each piece before sticking it into the die cut (a bit like a very fiddly jigsaw!) I used a grey for the leaf sections, with light blue and dark purple for the flower heads.

I had intended to leave the frame white, but didn’t think it balanced well against the paper piecing, so I cut one of the narrow frames from Julie Hickey’s square ‘layers, frames & banners’ set. I then coloured it with the dark purple alcohol pen and glued it onto the top of the white frame. As it was narrow, it left the white frame showing inside which gives a lovely 3D effect.

All it needed to finish was the sentiment stamped across the bottom in grey.

Thanks for dropping in. I’m going to share this card with CAS Colours & Sketches as I picked up their colour palette, together with the ‘frame’ theme from Just Add Ink