Spring Flowers

A very Good Morning to you all, I hope you are having a good weekend.

As it's the first Sunday in the month it means it's time for new challenges at Sir Stampalot and Penny Black and More, the card at the top is one of my DT pieces for the latter.

At Stampalot it's a challenging month for the DT as I set then all a task of creating two cards with two kits. I sent them all two kits of products much the same and today we are revealing what they came up with using the pearls and swirls kit...................their other makes will be shared later in the month. Of course I didn't expect to escape the challenge myself and here is what I came up with, but you really do need to go over the the challenge blog to see everyone else's wonderful work and to see what the theme is.

The DP's which form the basis of my card...........yep another easel...............are Alla Prima and I used one sheet to make the rosette onto which I added the focal image which is Hero Arts K5576 Newspaper Tulips which I inked with TH Mustard Seed, embossed with detail clear them sponged with TH tumbled glass.

Springtime is the theme at Penny Black and More this month, my favourite time of year so the theme was inevitable. I have ended up with three DT cards as the new release stamps from the Full of Surprises collection literally just landed here in the UK so I had to get inking and you will see two of the stamps on my card at the top of this post. The flowers are a Penny Black slapstick stamp 40-104 Spring Beauty so that had to be used for this months theme and the sentiment is PB 4263F Garden of Life. Both were stamped onto Fabriano watercolour card and embossed with detail clear, then coloured with Derwent watercolour pencils from the beautiful wooden box collection of 48 hubby bought me this last week.

The borders are cut with some of the new TH border dies using My Minds Eye DP which I also used for the mat behind the image cut with Go Create dies. The little embellies are some new metal ones called Floral Spacers from Stampalot which have holes through the middle for brads, although I just stuck mine on and added swarovsky crystals to the centres.

For my second card, I stamped Penny Black 3381K Aspire with Adirondack citrus and meadow, then stamped over this with Penny Black 3157H Growing Free using versafine black, cut out with Nesties 20 and layered onto a black panel cut with Nesties Fleur de Lis rectangle. That back panel is embossed with a Sizzix folder and I added some ribbon, leaves and flowers made from organza ribbon.

And finally just one more that was already in the mix before the new stamps landed, the technique is a bit involved so I will try and explain best I can. Please do mail me and ask if any part is not as clear as it might be.

For this second Penny Black DT piece I started by stamping the two images Penny Black 4039K Candid and 1483E Cherish Yesteday................as you can tell by the code this is a real oldie..............with archival black ink onto a piece of double sided adhesive. To do this I peeled away one side to do the stamping then placed the covering back on top but leaving about 1cm of the sticky showing at one end. Onto this exposed area I placed a piece of acetate cut ready to the size of the sticky piece and gradually peeled away the backing to allow me to lay the acetate directly onto the stamping.

Next I took a piece of tissue, scrunched it up and lightly inked using direct to paper with TH mustard seed, shabby shutters, sage used sparingly and Versamark champagne to add a bit of sparkle. I scrunched the tissue a bit more between each inking to expose more creases to pick up the ink. When I was happy with the tissue, I removed the reverse side of the double sided sticky paper and placed the tissue onto it.

Working from the tissue side I gently coloured the flowers with Copics..................doing this over a light source or against a window helps. You need to be a bit gentle so as not to tear the tissue, but it's amazing how much colour you can add at this stage. Finally I matted and layered onto the base card which I randomly stamped down one side with Hero Arts H2365 Old French Writing, a punched border, some pearls and cord. Finito !

I really hope you will be able to join in our challenges this month and look forward to popping over to your blogs to see what you created.