Hello everyone. I’ve got another sample to share with you today from the new Floral Elements collection, this time with Set 2 and some pencil colouring to meet our new challenge of ‘Make Your Mark’ at Addicted to Stamps & More. I’ve once again taken one of the new sample layouts that come with the stamps (an inspired idea!) as my starting point.

First was to sort the sentiment in the centre of the layout. I took a piece of 3.5″ stencil card and stamped ‘get well soon’ across the centre with black Archival ink. I wanted to frame it with an embedder and pulled out the Sentiment Embedder Stencil (one of January’s Product of the Month) – none of them were exactly the right size, so I picked one that had the correct depth and set about lengthening it. To do that, I positioned it where I needed it for the left side, flipped the card over and embossed with a ball tool from the back, just doing the left side and part-way along the top and bottom. I could then move the embedder to the right, keeping within the embossed lines then, turning again to the reverse, I finished the top and bottom and right hand side.

Although the sample layout featured double rows of the little single flowers, I opted instead to go with the strips of flowers and leaves, stamping them in black Archival ink and reversing the stamp’s orientation on each row so the leaves interlaced. Now the sharp-eyed amongst you will see that I managed to slightly smudge the bottom row, but I was hopeful that could be disguised once I added the colour…

So I brought out my Polychromo pencils to colour in these lovely little flowers and leaves, using ‘pink madder lake’ from the Spring set, ‘madder’ from Autumn and ‘violet’ from Winter. Having edged the topper with a black Sharpie, I embossed a frame onto the front of a 5×5 card using a square embedder and sat the topper within it.

How will you make your mark on your creations? Focus on anything that can make a mark like alcohol markers, coloured pencils, paint, stencilling, chalk, and so on. Digitally printed images are also fine as long as you have hand-coloured them in some way. We’re looking forward to a gallery filled with colours! I took my colour scheme for this card from Colorful Options and the CAS style from Simply Clean & Simple (not that I need much prompting to deliver my favourite style!)