Wild about flowers

Brenda Quintana has posted a wonderful video on YouTube using this set. Once I saw the diversity of what could be done with it I was keen to get it. It looks fairly non descript until you see the results.

All of these were so simple and yet effective. Rich Razzleberry and Mossy Meadow were used in this first one.

Now Calypso Coral and Mossy Meadow.

Island Indigo and Mossy Meadon. This set has great sentiments and it is fun to mix and match the flowers. Have a look at the video.

Real red for the flowers and Early Expresson for the leaves. Card base is Lost Lagoon and the Very Vanilla card front is mounted into an Early Expresson panel embossed with the Fluttering embossing folder and then it is matted with Crumb Cake. Lost Lagoon ribbon.

Another couple of variations follow.

 

By the Tide

This is a great stamp set and a nice change from floral stamps. I think especially it makes for a great masculine card.

This first one is in Early Expresso card and is matted with Crumb Cake. The Whisper White panel was stamped using an acrylic block which had been tapped with a Sahara Sand inkpad and then spritzed with water. Once dry I stamped the images with Early Expresso ink.

This time I used Soft Suede for the card base and Very Vanilla for the front. Images were a mixture of By the Tide (stamped in Early Expresso) and Kinda Eclectic (stamped in Soft Suede). The writing and dots in the background were achieved by stamping off to make the image very light.

I like to do square cards occasionally even though they use up more cardstock. Soft Suede and Very Vanilla again. The splotches are from Gorgeous Grunge.

The panel was masked and then sponged with Bermuda Bay, Tempting Turquoise and Night of Navy. The images were stamped in black. I hand drew the bubbles.

Just a few examples of what can be done with this set.

 

Garden Bloom

Love this two step stamp set. It's great that you can use all the stamps individually or singly. Very versatile.

These first few feature Real Red for the card bases. Love the red and black combos.

Last one is Blackberry Bliss and Turquoise. I am going to miss the Blackberry when it retires later this year.

 

Best Thoughts

Oh my goodness it is so long since I have posted. The end of the year got a bit crazy and during January I have become a little addicted to getting all of my old photos out of those awful sticky albums and into safe acid free albums. I have also collected all my photos from various parts of the house and have tried to collate and mount them into albums too. I have been using Project Life to do this and am starting to get into the rhythm of the process I am most comfortable with. It's been great as I feel I have re-lived some great parts of my life

However, back to card making! I bought the hostess set Best Thoughts a while ago and wasn't that excited when I started using it. But then when I got out the aqua pen it started to come alive.

This is Mint Macaroon and Tip Top Taupe. All I did was to stamp the image in the new Archive black ink and colour the leaves with a blender pen and Mint Macaroon ink. The ribbon is the Sahara Sand Lace trim. I coloured the stamens in So Saffron and rounded the edges. How easy! I am pretty sure that I cased this card but can't find where I cased it from. Sorry!

Pool Party is the card base, the Matt was embossed with the Fluttering embossing folder. The flower was embossed in white and then coloured in Pool Party with highlights of Wisteria Wonder and Lost Lagoon. The leaves are Old Olive I think. The secret to colouring these sorts of images I think is to emboss them. This makes using an aqua painter so easy and quick as the ink tends to stay within the embossed edges. The colour combinations were cased from Helene Den Breejen. She has a great video, although not in English, which shows her painstaking watercoloring technique. Beautiful result but I am too impatient to do it like that!

This one was cased from Linda Higgins. It is embossed in white on Pink Pirouette and the same colour ink is used with an aqua Pinter on the petals with careful highlights of Rose Red. Again yellow stamens.

Card base is Elegant Eggplant and the card from is Wisteria Wonder. Again I have embossed the image in white and coloured it with Wisteria Wonder with Perfect Plum and a small amount of Elegant Eggplant as highlights. I love this tone on tone technique.

This last one was cased from Alisa Tilsner. Again the image is embossed and Pink Pirouette is used with small highlights of the same colour but less less diluted ink. The Matt is the Brick Wall embossing folder.

I ended up just loving this stamp set.