Monday Make with Creative Expressions

Start of a new week and I hope it goes a lot better for me than last week! Suffice to say I have a new heat gun, a repaired Cuttlebug and a new printer. Why? Well all three items decided to break last week. 

Today sees the start of a new month of makes with Creative Expressions and some new stamps. These are a lovely set featuring English country garden flowers and some lovely sentiments. 

I have chosen to show you a project I made using the Sunflower Delight stamp. At the time of being given the stamps to work with it was still unclear which sentiment would go with which flower so I opted for the Happy Days wording from the Desert Daisies set. 

Triple Sunflower card

I also used an older stamp for the background, Botanical Spray. It is the one I used for the Gilded Box, such a versatile stamp.

The colouring was done using the pastel set of Cosmic Shimmer Watercolour paints. This set is a beautiful collection of colours reminiscent of an ice cream parlour! But looking at the project these colours don't need to be pale and quiet! Look how they shout out, all zingy and zesty!

First I took a piece of plain A3 white card and coloured it in a loose rainbow style with the paints. Remember my old mantra about colouring more than you need so you have spare should you need it but also so that you can choose your favourite areas. 

Once this was completely dry, yes it has to be bone dry, I stamped and embossed the sunflower 3 times using black embossing powder. I tried to get a good cross-section of colours in the background. I cut these out and mounted them on a 'barely-there' black card mount.

Next I stamped and embossed the remaining card using the Botanical Spray and clear embossing powder. 

To make the background more interesting I then re-painted the colours over the top of the clear embossing. The trick was to not be precise about matching the colours but to allow some overlapping of colours so if you look at these close up shots you can see where the under colour is showing through the second coat. So for example where the undercoat was yellow blending into green I allowed the second coat to be more of the green blending into the blue.

Does that make sense? I can feel a step-by-step coming on.......

For the sentiment I stamped and embossed in black along an off-cut of the card. 

All in all this is a pretty little card, full of colour and sunshine!

Hope you like my project, please feel free to leave a comment and if you have any questions please ask! 

Thanks for dropping by. 

Kim