Welcome to my crafty blog and a card with a new stamp set that arrived earlier this week – Stampin’ Up!’s ‘delicate dahlias’. I’ve been using quite a few of my older sets recently after tidying my craft shelves, so thought I’d ring the changes with this one. I took the layout from the current Freshly Made Sketches challenge and teamed it with the new colour palette from Color Throwdown

I started by stamping the dahlia outline onto a piece of white card and heat embossing it with WOW’s ‘metallic gold’ superfine powder. I cut a mask for it from a sticky note and then stamped a second flower to sit slightly behind it, which I also heat embossed in gold. I added the leaves either side of the flowers using ‘bundled sage’ Distress Oxide.

The next step was to shade in the dahlias – I used ‘wilted violet’ and ‘dried marigold’ Distress Oxides with a waterbrush so I could blend them on the petals to try and achieve that lovely effect on dahlias where the centre is darker than the outer petal.

I stamped the outline of the leaves over background ones for extra definition and then attached the topper to a 5×7 card blank. I stamped the sentiment from the ‘quite curvy’ set in ‘pebble shore’ Archival Ink (to reflect the kraft shade in Color Throwdown’s palette) and cut it out with one of the coordinating ‘curvy’ dies. I glued it across the card front and added a few gold Glossies to finish

I was lucky enough to go to the Chelsea Flower Show with friends last week – there were lots of dahlias on display as it was an autumn show this year. This set seemed the obvious choice when my friend then asked me to make a card for her mother-in-law, who is passionate about flowers. I hope she likes it