Take Time to Smell the Flowers on a Blog Named Hero

Our floral challenge is in full swing, and honestly, the toughest problem I had was deciding which floral image to use.  

I finally decided to break out my new bees and flowers and honey pot fancy dies to make this slimline card that upcycles a page from an old road atlas (remember those!) and reshapes a large die cut honey pot into a smaller, rather elegant vase.  

Details are over on A Blog Named Hero (and so is your chance to win one of two $50 vouchers for Hero Arts).

 Can’t wait to see what you make! 

 Thanks for stopping by,

Essie

Big Floral Fantasy Flower for A Blog Named Hero's March Challenge

 Hello crafty friends!  

It's month two for me on A Blog Named Hero's design team, and what a talented group of people I'm finding in my co-designers! (It's pretty intimidating, really...but also seems to push me to try new things.)

This month's challenge (and the chance to win a $50 gift certificate from Hero Arts!) may be my one of my favorite themes for cardmaking:  Florals.

the first cards I made were all about florals--and flowers are still my very favorite things to color.  I love all the color you can use with flowers and those color can be soft or strong, true to life or simply fantastical.

What I did:  For today's card I tried a technique that was new to me--I heat embossed the outline of this biiiiig flower (I mean really big--like five inches (13cm) across on an alcohol ink panel.  I wondered if I could successfully heat emboss the paper--I had used Yupo, which is basically a plastic paper--without melting it or making the embossing powder bubble. Turns out it worked out just fine. I'll be doing this again, for sure!

I fussy cut the flower and leaves; popped them up on a gel press background using foam squares (look closely and you'll see I the mail jumble peekaboo stamp doing duty as a background)with some spattered gold and green and black inks and paints to give that background some interest; and added one of my favorite sentiment dies that I embossed about 4 times, to get a really rounded standout effect. I matted my panel with black card stock, popped it onto my card base--et voila (as my French design team friend might say), a finished card!  

By the way:  This is a 5X7 inch (A7) card.  I've been making those a lot lately. I think that this large format is a real wow from the time the envelope arrives in your recipient's mailbox.  Also, I really love big bold images--and this larger format really helps show off those images.  Honestly, it would have broken my heart to cut up that big peony.

Have you tried a 5X7 card?  What about heat embossing?  Gel press?  Alcohol ink?  It seems this card--which features each of these--is sort of a demo of all of these techniques (I love to color, too, but a little experimentation is good fun, too!)

Can't wait to see your floral cards--I hope you'll play along with us!

Thanks so much for stopping by, 

Essie