Monday Make with Creative Expressions

Hello! Welcome to my Monday Make with Creative Expressions. Did you have a good weekend? It was clear blue skies all day on Sunday here on the Welsh coast and I made the most of it by taking my lunch to the beach and eating 'al fresco'. It was a truly glorious day, look.......

OK, so the tide was out but this shot looking back towards the village where I live sums up the whole reason why I moved here! The sea and the estuary are right on my doorstep and I can go for a walk along a beautiful coastline anytime I want, rain or shine but I have been very luck with the weather so far as it has been mostly sunny!

Right, on with the main reason for being here, my project. Once again I have used the brilliant Poinsettia dies. I have used the plain die to cut the flowers (well, they are technically leaves on a Poinsettia) and then used the filigree die to just emboss onto the die cuts. 

I started by colouring a piece of white card with the Cosmic Shimmer Pastel Aqua and Pastel Lilac water colours. I was quite random with the painting as I wanted a noticeable variation of colour on the finished flowers.

Once this was dry I cut out 3 of each of the poinsettia flowers from the Festive Collection Classic Poinsettia die set. I only used the ones with the 5 petals. 

I then ran these die cuts through my die cutting machine with the corresponding Festive Collection Filigree die but ONLY to emboss, so using the embossing plate and tan mat. It is important that you line up the die cut correctly, the petals are not all the same shape. 

Before assembling the flowers I went over each one with a little Cosmic Shimmer Texture Paste in Lilac Blush and Aurora Sparkle. I used the lilac on the largest and smallest and the aurora on the medium sized flower.

When they were dry I gave each petal a gentle bend downwards before assembling using Cosmic Shimmer glue.

While these were drying I made the background paper. I used the Foundations Dark Navy which I ran through the embossing machine with the Spellbinders M-Bossabilities Valor folder on the cross side. I then smeared the side with the hollows with some Texture paste. I scraped the excess off just to leave the glitz in the hollows. The 'liquid' part of the texture paste actually made the paper surface a little shiny in the process so hidden bonus there! This was left to dry and cut to fit the card blank.

I used some remnants of the coloured card to cut out and emboss the Joy and Peace sentiments from the Festive Collection Sentiment dies and again filled the hollows with the texture paste.

Finally when everything was completely dry and ready to handle I got to the assembly stage. I used some of the Creative Expressions Self adhesive Pearl swirls to add extra interest.

Hope you found this project an inspiration. As always it is great to get your comments and I look forward to seeing you again next Monday.

Kim