Hello everyone. It’s the 15th of the month so time for our new theme at Sparkles Challenge, and this month we’re playing with poppies! I’ve opted to use the Bijou Poppy Posy stamps, with a less usual colour scheme inspired by the Himalayan Blue poppy – it is a real flower!

I started with a 12cm (4.75″) square of premium card and embossed a circle onto it using a round embedder and ball tool, to frame my poppies. I then stamped the posy outline stamp into the circle with brown ‘potting soil’ Archival ink.

Rather than use the infill stamp, I opted for Polychromos to shade in the image, smoothing out the colouring with a blending nib.

I stamped the sentiment from the Dog Rose Posy set, again in the ‘potting soil’, then simply added a mount of blue Indian Summer companion paper and attached the topper to a 6×6 card blank.

I am staying firmly in my favourite ‘clean & simple’ lane at the moment, not least because my craft room (and the rest of the ground floor in the house) is currently undergoing renovation following a major rewiring of the house while I was away on my travels earlier this year. My furniture is currently in storage while the walls & ceilings have been replastered, and will be redecorated once they’re fully dried out in a few weeks. It will all be done within the next month and will be brilliant, but in the meantime I’m camping upstairs and crafting in part of my spare bedroom, with my ‘essential’ supplies all in boxes across the bed and in the corner, which is rather limiting my creativity! Still, it will all be worth the disruption in the end.

Anyway, back to this card which I’m also going to share with Creative Colour Challenges, whose palette I used, and Triple B for their ‘blooms’ option.