Making Flower Embellishments - A Little How-To Post plus Sunday Snippets

Hello Everyone,

One of the many crafting websites I pop over to regularly is Shimelle Laine's Pretty Paper, True Stories where it's possible to find lots of inspirational posts covering a wide variety of techniques. A recent post by Gretchen McElveen is on making flowers. I couldn't resist trying this out for myself and thought you might like to give it a try too.

Here's the flower and here's how it was made.

Step 1: It's simple enough. Take a couple of the small shaped ink pads, Gretchen used Colorbox Cat's Eye pads, I used Memento Dewdrops pads - the colours are Love Letter and Pear Tart - and some white cardstock. Stamp the ink pads all over the card. It's stating the obvious I know but the red shapes are for the 'petals', and the green for the 'leaves'. I did try a couple of deeper colours, Rhubarb Stalk and Pistachio - you can see one of each in two of the corners - but preferred the lighter colours.

Step 2: Outline each shape using a black fine line pen - the one I have is an Artline 200 Fine 0.4. You don't have to be too exact ... this is just as well because I can hardly draw a straight line to save myself :)

Step 3: Cut the shapes out leaving a narrow margin of white round each shape ... again you don't need to be precise.

Step 4: Pierce each shape at what will be the base of the 'petal'/'leaf' with a pokey tool. Next, arrange five 'petals' to form a flower shape and then place two or three of the 'leaves' behind. Finally, push a brad through the pierced holes and fasten at the back. End result: a fabulous flower embellishment that can be used on any project.

I've used the two flowers I made to decorate two cards but they could just as easily be used to embellish any project that calls for flowers.

The cards were made using white die-cut card bases, plain green or pink cardstock and some leftover scraps of patterned paper, trimmed with a scalloped edge punch. The toppers are die-cut scalloped edge circles (bought from e-bay back in the days before I had a die-cutting machine) stamped with the sentiment and embellished with the flowers and tiny hearts punched from a snippet of card inked with the red ink pad. The final embellishment is the card candy.

Because of those tiny snippets and the leftover scraps of patterned paper I'm submitting both card to:

Pixie's Snippets Playground - Week 139

And that is all for today : ) Rather later than I intended but I've been busy sorting out stuff in the garden. I only meant to be out there for an hour or so but it was such a lovely sunny day that I got quite absorbed and lost track of time. 

Hope you had as good a day too.

Happy Crafting.