Flowers all around

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

Now I do have several shares for Stamping Sensations this month but when I tell you our sponsor is Chocolate Baroque you will understand why. I can't begin to tell you how much I love working with their stamps and count myself so fortunate to be part of their team.

My above creation is one I made for a recent Hochanda show which featured so many beautiful floral and Nature inspired stamps, during this month I will be sharing quite a few over at the CB blog and of course here. I managed to squeeze in so many stampes on this one from the following stamp sets: Honey Bee, Fragrant Honeysuckle, Glorious Spring and Artistic Affirmations. 

I saw this shape of card on Pinterest and rather liked it for something a bit different.......be warned I have made several so there's more to come. No instructions were provided but it's a really simple one to make, I used an A3 sheet of black card, scored it twice to create the three sections and got two base cards of slightly different depths. Cut the end section crosswise corner to corner and the offcut provided me with the pocket in the middle, then I cut the top pieces for stamping slightly smaller so there was a black border. Next Oxide inks, lots of stamping and some stenciling, rather a lot going on but I do rather like the end result and apparently Lesley did as well which was nice to hear.

My Penny Black and More share uses the gorgeous Flower Lanterns which I repeat stamped onto Bristol Vellum cardstock inking the stamp with Distress Markers and a spritz of water. I then used TL pin dot rectangle dies to cut the piece into four, stamped the PB image and then layered the pieces to re-assemble the flowers increasing the height by doubling and trebling the foam pads.

My next Stamping Sensations share used Chocolate Baroque Poppy stamps. After stamping the Poppies with black versafine I cut out around the top part of the stamp so that I could place a circle die to cut the aperture, ensuring the cut section of the image laid outside the die. The focal sentiment is also CB as are the stencils used to add the leaves and dragonflies for which I used pan pastels. Finally I stamped and cut out another Butterfly and added some liquid pearl drops.

My final share is yet another CB make for Hochanda, I built up the scene with several stamps, coloured the sky and water with Pan Pastels and Spectrum pencils.

Happy Sunday all and I do hope you will pop over to the challenge blogs to see all the inspiration from my team mates and of course join us this month.