A Russian influence and Spring flowers

It's time for our challenges at Stamping Sensations and Penny Black and More where our themes are 'Anything Goes' and 'All things Spring'. As always there are wonderful prizes to be won at both.

Spring is a season I love and there is no shortage of stamps in my stash that fit the theme, so for this months share I have used both the lovely PB Daffodil Dance and Cherry Blossoms, a love chunky wood mounted stamp. I create a base card using the waste from another card using Timmy's Vintage Cabinet die, I made a small spine to join the two together and then used DI's to distress the edges and a stencil to add some interest to the corners.

Next two pieces of Fabriano, very softly inked with DI's, stamped both the images inking with distress markers direct to stamp and spritzed with water before stamping. I added some honeycomb stenciling and fixed in place behind the apertures with foam pads. Some twine and a Butterfly from PB Love Art clear set.

Two Stamping Sensations creations, the one above is one of the samples I made for last weeks Chocolate Baroque shows on Hochanda when a collection of wonderful Russian inspired stamps were released. I adore this image with the beautiful Katya and traditional Russian costume and wanted to keep this simple to let the face do all the talking. So I stamped with black versafine, embossed with clear powder and coloured sparingly with just red and gold, placing the image inside another waste frame after cutting a TH Cabinet Card die..................it was never my intention but I realise only now that two of my cards have the same frames and both are using the waste..............I think I actually prefer the waste element. The two buildings/temples are another of the new releases and again minimal colouring, finally matted onto red card and some gold beading across the top. I would like to enter this into Miss Di's current Snippets Playground Challenge.

The card at the top started out as a Parisian scene created with masks and Pan pastels but I wasn't sure where I was going next, then decided on Roses to the fore using the new Penny Black Red Blush....but yellow......repeat stamping the image several times and embossing with detail clear. I coloured the Roses with Spectrum pencils and stamped a few leaves with a Chocolate Baroque stamp, coloured to match the Roses and stamped a few birds in the sky.

As always we have some super prizes to be won at both challenges and my team mates have lots of inspiration to share so I hop you will pop over the the challenge blogs to take a look.