Hello friends. I was crafting along this afternoon while watching Barbara Gray on Clarity Social TV, using one of Clarity Crafts‘ fab KISS (Keep It Simple Stamping) sets – ‘brighten your day flowers‘. I found a background piece in my stash that had the colours from Hand Stamped Sentiments, including the purple that’s Clarity’s colour of the month – serendipity is a wonderful thing. I’m also going to share these flower-filled notecards with TripleB – they’ve got blooms and butterflies!

OK, there’s lots of photos coming up, so stand by…! The background I found was made with the ‘woven fabric – textiles‘ mixed impressions stamp. I cannot remember how long ago I made it, but I never managed to find a use for it until now, thanks to Barbara’s blog yesterday talking about chopping up larger pieces to make smaller toppers. So that’s exactly what I did – it was on a piece of A5 card so cut nicely into four ATC sized pieces.

I then simply took the flowers from the stamp set and added them to each piece with black Archival ink, switching round the orientation and placement so they were slightly different.

I went with a variety of techniques to colour them as well. For the first one I watercoloured with a blend of ‘shaded lilac’ and ‘dusty concord’ Distress inks

The next two used my trusty Pergaliner pencils, picking up the purple & pink from the background

Finally I went for the yellow, putting down an undercoat on the flowers with a Pergaliner pencil, then filling them in with Pergacolour pens. I was less happy with this one, but you’ll see on the final versions that it looked a lot better with the addition of the butterfly from the stamp set which balanced out the strong colours.

So I then simply used rectangle and square embedders to create frames on the front of 5×5 card blank, ran a black Sharpie around the edge of each topper and glued them into place. the final touch was to add the sentiments – two had ‘brighten your day’ from the stamp set’ and the other two got ‘thank you’ from the occasions sentiments’ set.

It feels so good to have made a little set like this from one background – it definitely got usable once I chopped it down!