Hello friends. I’ve been trying to catch a bit of the sunshine today inbetween work meetings, but sat down to a bit of crafting earlier this evening while watching Clarity’s Paul Church on HobbyMaker TV with the fab floral frame dies. I went with the hapy birthday one on my card – and then realised it’s out of stock! Panic not, though, the other four dies in the collection are available – here’s the link

Once again, I’ve pulled a few challenges together with this one. Seize the Birthday are looking for flowers, The Flower Challenge want spots or stripes (I’ve got both!) and CAS on Friday have gone with black & white plus one other colour. Read on for the deets…

As with lots of Clarity’s dies, these floral frames are aperture dies so I started by cutting it into a square of black card that I’d trimmed to fit on a 6×6 card blank. I used a square embedder to emboss a frame on the card front and then attached the die cut within it (I’d put Stick It thin adhesive sheet on the back before cutting it which made life much easier!) I took an offcut of one of the BOW-WOB (black-on-white/white-on-black) papers, popped Stick It on the back and cut the centre part of the die from it, so that I could piece it in on the card front.

I found a lovely piece of teal Antarctica comnpanion paper, so cut the die for a third time into that. I then set about piecing the flowers in, keeping the paper in the die and picking out each piece as I needed it. The small flowers got a bit fiddly and I drew the line at the very smallest pieces but I really like the contemporary feel this gives.

Having finished piecing in the flowers on my black & white one, I had the main die cut left in the Antarctica companion paper, so simply popped it onto another card front with an embedder frame. I cut the sentiment out of the centre piece and added that in, giving me a very quick and easy card simply using the die. I may do a bit more paper piecing into the flowers on this with a contrast colour…

Thanks for dropping in. I’ll be back with another creation tomorrow – and I’m aiming to catch a bit more time outdoors as the weather forecast for the weekend is looking good!