Varied Vases & Lotus Flowers

Hello, Crafters.

I hope you’ve had a super weekend. If you’re here in the UK, I hope you’re still enjoying this long weekend – today is a Bank Holiday in the UK! Yesterday I started sorting out my retiring stamp sets, and re-organising my Stamp Reference File. Today I plan to finish it off, and move onto labelling my new Designer Series Paper, new files for the In-Colour Cardstock, and taking out the retiring cardstock. I need to keep everything handy as there are still nine days before the new catalogue goes live!Today’s card is my favourite style, i.e. clean and simple. I have enjoyed having the Gingham Gala DSP for the last few months, and I’ll be sad to see it go! However, I’m really excited about the DSP that’s in the new catalogue, and looking forward to playing with it. To create today’s card I decided to use Highland Heather for today’s card. To colour the flowers – I think they’re lotus flowers but I’m happy to be corrected! – I used the Light and Dark Highland Heather Stampin’ Blends. The highlighting I did made the flowers quit a bit darker than regular Highland Heather. This enabled me to use Gorgeous Grape Ink for the vase. I think using a darker colour for the main image on the card makes it really pop! The piece of Whisper White Cardstock (CS) I’ve used for the flowers and vase, has been languishing in my scrap Whisper White box for quite a long time. It had been die cut using one of the Rectangle Stitched Framelits Dies. As I was working away, I suddenly realised I’d adhered the flowers and vase to the wrong side! If you watch my videos, you’ll know that I use my bone folder to flatten the raised cut edges on cardstock cut on a trimmer, on the reverse side. I decided to see if this would work on the reverse side of a stitched die. The good news is that it worked brilliantly. The stitching still wasn’t as good as it is on the right side, but for me, it definitely looked a lot better. As it turned out, I decided it was too big. I trimmed it down, and removed all the stitching!  This allowed me to use the same size die to die cut the Highland Heather layer. Once I’d done this, I was pleased with how everything fitted in! I popped the image onto the Gingham Gala DSP using Dimensionals. Before I started to put my layers on my card base, I wanted to tie a piece of ribbon around the front, but under the image. I achieved this by adhering the image with short strips of Dimensionals horizontally. This worked really well, and I tied a bow on the left hand side of the image.To decorate the inside of the card I adhered a layer each of Highland Heather and Whisper White CS. I had a vase leftover, and a sprig of the flowers, which I had fussy cut without leaving any white CS exposed.

That’s about it from me today. I hope you have a great week and I’ll be back tommorrow morning. In the meantime, happy crafting.

JanB. xx

Products used: please click on any link to be taken to my 24/7 online Stampin’ Up! shop.