Flowers Galore

I hope you are all enjoying the weekend. I know the weather has been a bit wild and woolly for some of you, hopefully things are calmer today.

We have been quite lucky. It was breezy yesterday but quite bright and today has been absolutely lovely. I even got to spend the morning in the garden tidying up all the dead leaves and cutting things back ready for the spring and it felt almost hot in the sunshine!! I don't know about you, but I always feel so much better when I've managed to get some fresh air.

The challenge over at Tuesday Taggers this week is to create something without using patterned paper. Now this is right up my street as I don't tend to use a lot of patterned paper anyway on my cards.

After a long awaited visit to The Stampman a few weeks ago I treated myself to Kay Carley's Funky Flowers stamp set and at last I've managed to have a play with them. After watching Jill on C&C recently I had lots of new ideas to try out.


I stamped out the flowers and coloured round the edge of them with the Sakura stardust pens and then spread the colour with a water brush. It certainly makes your pens last longer and I love the soft effect. I then used one of the single flowers to stamp all round the edge in orange. This was then matted onto some printer paper that had Shabby Shutters Distress ink wiped all over and then stamped on in the same colour to create a background paper.


Around the main card I used a stalk and leaf stamp from the Funky flowers and stamped in Brilliance pearlescent rust and galaxy gold.


I made the flower embellishment by stamping two of the single flowers in different sizes and cutting them out. They were coloured with watercolour pencils and some stickles added. The leaves were punched out of the distress ink BP and I added some extra stamping to darken them.

Tiny jewels were added to the corners to finish things off.

I'm learning lots of techniques for card making from all your lovely blogs and am beginning to find putting them together much easier so a big thank you for all your inspiration.

Thank you as always for stopping by.

Decluttering The Garden

My Dragonsdream blog friend Frankie invited me to look at her slide show of her beautiful garden last week. I had a lovely time browsing and was very envious of the order and space she has created, which shows her stunning bamboos, maples and wisteria, all my favourites. It looks a serene and calming garden, unlike my own jungle stuffed with as many plants as possible.

Why am I telling you this, you might ask, well I went into the garden on Saturday afternoon, very dischuffed with what I saw and decided to go a bit mad and actually take out some rather large overgrown plants so that I can actually see what is flowering and looking beautiful. By Sunday teatime, a very large honeysuckle smothering a lovely red climbing rose had gone (I still have one up another archway) and replaced with a pale pink climbing rose and a lovely but totally unpratical golden hop up an obelisk had also bitten the dust. Other plants have been dug up and divided and everything cut back and tidied up. My brown bin is full to overflowing but the difference is amazing.

After digging, climbing ladders and heaving out giant roots I had not an ounce of strength left after tea to lift any craft tools until tonight so my tag for Frankie's Tag It On challenge has been very last minute this week.


Her theme is Passion so I have done my take on it and my tag represents my passion for life. Lovely fresh, bright colours and dragonflies which somehow seem magical when you see them hovering in thin air in their brilliant suit of clothes.

I've used some Elusive design stamps and distress inks which have been applied to the stamp randomly. I stamped onto some spare paper first, spritzed the stamp with water and then stamped on the tag and I love the watercolour effect you end up with. Some Kay Carley swirls were stamped round the edge with whispers blue ink and then the dragonflies were stamped onto vellum, cut out and painted with glimmer mists, which makes them curl beautifully (thank you Brenda for this tip, I love the effect). I applied a bit of diamond stickles to their wings for a bit of bling. The wording was done on the computer.


I really will try to be a better crafter this week. I have several teachers Thank you cards to do, so no excuses!!!!