Hello friends – welcome to Friday and our new theme at As You See It Challenge. It’s the return of our speed stamping challenge, where we ask you to make your card in 10 minutes or less, this time on the theme of tulips or other bulb flowers. I reached out for the Build a Bloom stamps to create my tulips, together with the ‘haystack’ stencil (which I don’t think has seen any action before this, despite sitting in my stash for some time!)

Now there are a few rules for our speed stamping challenges. You can gather everything you need, mount stamps, etc but you must start your timer as soon as you ink up a stamp or start to cut your paper. Here’s my desk at the starting point – and this is an unusual scene for me, as I don’t generally get everything to hand first and often make design decisions as I go along (what I call the ‘evolving’ style of card making!) Anyway, I got everything lined up, started my timer and set off

The first step was to line the ‘haystack’ stencil along the bottom of a 3.5″ square of premium card and brush ‘mowed lawn’ Distress Oxide through it. I then inked up the centre piece of my tulip by sponging ‘villainous potion’ onto it, stamped it off once onto copy paper then planted it on to the card (second generation). Next was to add ink to the double petal shape, then stamp that over the central one. I added the stem, squiggle below the petals and the leaves in the ‘mowed lawn’. I sponged the ‘villainous potion’ onto one of the Statement Sentiments and added that, before scattering a few of the little polka dot flowers around the tulip. With a mount of Toscana companion paper I simply attached it to a 5×5 card blank and stopped the clock!

And this is what my stopwatch revealed – a pretty respectable 7 minutes 6 seconds! How quickly do you think you can produce a tulip, daffodil or other bulb flower card? Come on over to the As You see It gallery and join in the fun – and don’t forget to tell us your completion time.

I’m going to enter this into a couple of other challenge galleries too, having taken my palette from Color Hues and added my polka dot flowers for Just Add Ink.

And in other news, I’ll be demonstrating with these fab stamps at Clarity’s Open Days next month! I’m so looking forward to it – it’s always so good to connect with crafty friends. Tickets are on sale on the Clarity website – only £10 for the day.