Blooming in the sun

Hello, crafting friends!

 

What a pleasure it was today to have a rummage through my older stamps and come up with a pretty floral birthday card using inspiration from some favourite challenges :)

I used a long-ago retired Stampin' Up set called Butterfly Basics that I used to have when I was a demo, and that a very good friend found and gifted to me last year (thank you so much lovely!) I started by masking off the side and bottom of a thick card base and sponged yellow ink into Clearly Besotted's Sunny Day stencil. The long stamp from the set was used to create a strong vertical and horizontal axis.

I stamped the flower on a piece of scrap card, coloured it with coloured pencils and fussy cut it. To tie the flower into the background, I used the red pencil to add a shadow to the darker red stamping too.

 

To work out the position of the sentiment, I first positioned the flower on the card front without glue.  Using a stamping platform, I stamped the sentiment several times for a nice crisp black finish and then glued the flower in place.

CHALLENGES

I used Linda's fabulous sketch from this week's Freshly Made Sketches, so I shall link up there; I'm also playing along with Allsorts where Brenda has chosen an Anything Goes theme with the option of adding a stencil; and last but not least, I'm finally managing to join in at The Paper Players where my friend Joanne has come up with a fun tic tac toe board to inspire us - I chose the centre row CAS/Flower/Birthay.

AND IN OTHER NEWS

This is the time of year I look out for flowers on my walks. There's not much blooming in the countryside (apart from bloomin' mud!) but in the parks and gardens there are bulbs beginning to come out as well as some other brave plants. Look at these wonderful snowdrops I found on a local walk that uysed to be a railway line! 

Eva is trying to eclipse them with her beaming smile and I might be biased but I think she has succeeded!!

Sending hugs,