Hello crafty friends. It’s been another hot day here in the South East of England and we’re heading into another major heatwave later this week (which will possibly break the June temperature records, after last month’s record breaking spell as well). Anyway, after the busy-ness of the last few days at the Open Days, I took today off to go out for lunch with my best friends at a wonderful farm shop out in Essex. I was pleased we’d arrange this, as my Affirmation card (a great new idea developed by Clarity) for today said this:

Anyway, I’ve still got to sort out all my demo samples from the weekend (there’s quite a pile to finish off!), so I dropped in to share a card I made a couple of months ago that’s been waiting for it’s moment in the sun! This one uses one of the pretty SHAC Bouquets, which I sat on one of the Landscape Backdrop Prints.

So, having cut the landscape backdrop down to 5×5 inches, I stamped the poppies bouquet onto it in black Archival ink. As you can see, I then shaded it with a selection of Polychromo pencils, using ‘pink madder lake’, ‘rose carmine’, ‘madder’, ‘may green’, ‘permanent green olive’, and ‘cream’.

Now, I was thinking about how to anchor the bouquet so it wasn’t left floating in mid-air. I remembered the vases in the Floral Delights stamp set, so stamped one of those onto a scrap of clear parchment, fussy cut it and attached it over the bouquet with Perga glue (which is specially made for parchment). Once the vase was in place, I added the sentiment next to it.

And then it was on to my favourite (and usual!) finishing techniques by running a black Sharpie around the card edges and using a square embedder and ball tool to emboss an indented frame onto a 7×7 card blank.

And before you all shout that the flowers are in the vase still in their paper wrapping, that’s exactly what my son would do (and has done in the past!).

I’m going to pop off now to share this with a few current challenges. Seize the Birthday want us to use vellum (parchment) on our cards and Just Us Girls have a beautiful floral moodboard. I haven’t played along with TicTacToe for a while now, but their latest grid is right up my street – I’ve pulled together floral, pink & birthday for this one.