Blooming Marvelous!

You'd think that the cue word of "BLOOMING" would be a blooming breeze - we all love flowers - have tonnes of flowers in our stash and loads of ways of using them right?  Well, it is the cue at CASology this week http://casology.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/week-44-bloom.html  and I've been VERY unsuccessfully trying to do "something different" with flowers all week for it.....

I played with felt, with masks, with stamps, with die cuts - you name it - I probably played with it - but everything was just bleugh!   I did spot this card by Maille as part of the new release for PTI this week though and I was really drawn to how she "squared off" the stamped and die cut images and I decided to try and case it.  I went with a die cut daisy which it turns out, is not the easiest shape to do this with - too much open space between the petals (hence the double daisy for the largest flower) but after a lot of messing around and taking things on and off about 2,638,452 times - I ended up with this.....

I used PTI embroidered blooms to add interest to the die cut centres and layered them up for dimension using the die cuts in the xcut daisy set (it has round and scalloped centres of different sizes to match)  The card stock is American Crafts Tropical set (another lovely bargain from TK Maxx) along with some spotty DP from my snippets draw.  I thought it needed quite a large sentiment to balance the flowers so went with one of my favourites from Many Birthday Wishes from Hero Arts

I'm also going to enter this into the simon says flower power challenge this week http://simonsaysstampschallenge.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/simon-saysflower-power.html

and into Di's Sunday Snippets challenge - I didn't make much of a dint in my stash with this one - just half of a left over half sheet - but as the famous supermarket says "every little helps!"  http://pixiescraftyworkshop.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/pixies-crafty-snippets-playground-week_12.html