Hydrangeas

It was my Mother's Birthday yesterday and I was really inspired by a scrapbook layout from the fabulously talented Gabriella Polaco a while back where she showed a great technique for making hydrangeas  http://gabriellepollacco.blogspot.ca/2012/03/welcome-spring-with-pretty-bloom.html  My mum loves flowers of any kind so I knew an interpretation of her scrapbook layout would make a great card for her and this is what I came up with (sorry the colours are really off - the base card is much more pink than the red it seems here so does go much nicer with the blooms - but as the grey skys refuse to move we're back to fake light photos!)

Here is a close up of the pot (cut from a cricut cartridge, as was the branch) which does show the flowers in more realistic colours - they were cut with a MS punch from dotty bazil card and glued on with pinflair glue with a liquid pearl centre.

The frame for the sentiment is waltzingmouse and the sentiment is computer generated using the new scriptina front which I much prefer as they've fixed the kerning issues.  The little bird was fussy cut from some freebie papers with one of the magazines this month.

I can report that it went down very well and has pride of place on the mantelpiece :-)

I am entering the following challenges:

Moving along with the times - Flowers or Garden
Little Darlings - Flowers
Prairie Fairy Fridays - Anything with flowers
Aud Sentiments - Anything Goes
Simon Says - Anything Goes

Less is More again for Mum...

It's my Mum's birthday today, so I needed to make her a card, but unfortunately I woke up feeling not so well on Saturday and I had to cut my day out short as I felt really dizzy and nauseous.  I think I must have picked up some sort of bug so I went to bed at 6pm on Saturday night haven't really moved from the bed or sofa since.  We're supposed to be visiting friends for a couple of days so I hope I start to feel better tomorrow.

Anyhow, no matter how bad I felt, I still had to make Mum a card and before cutting our day out short on Saturday I did manage to pick up a lovely new stamp from Stampendous - one of their jumbo cling stamps.  I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it, but Mum loves hydrangeas so I knew it was the right thing to start off with.  When I stamped it, I realised it lent itself to this weeks LIM theme of off-centre as the stamp itself leans to the right, so I decided to take that as the inspiration and make Mum a CAS card, not the normal thing I give her - I think I made the right decision as she absolutely loved it and didn't believe I'd actually made it (the cheek!!)

It's an 8x8 blank card with a slightly textured finish - it needed to be this large to accommodate the jumbo stamp (I want the others in this range too now they are lovely to work with), but I stamped it on my copic colouring card 3 times and cut out the individual blooms from the extra two stamps to do a decoupage effect.  I coloured with copics, and added some fine lines with my pencils, using blues, lilacs and soft pinks.  A bit of glitter in the middle over a darker aqua copic.  I used the same aqua colour to colour tint some chipboard letters to spell out Mother, and gave them a heavy glittering with glamour dust.  A simple Happy Birthday stamp in between and then I resisted the urge to fill any more of the white space.....  I'm really happy with this second entry to LIM this week.

I did a matching insert in word - I wrote my own sentiment (borrowed from an old birthday card...) and found a clip art hydrangea which I "blurred" the edge of by 25%, and then made the whole image brighter by 40% to give it a soft enough feel to go behind the text.

Thanks for your comments so far - I'll try to get around as many of you as I can later, but I can only manage about 10 minutes at a time on line before I feel dizzy and sick again.

Thanks for stopping by again.

                                                      Craftilicious  x