Wildflower Sympathy

Today I'm sharing a card featuring the beautiful Wildflower Garden stamp set from Altenew. This set includes some sentiments for sympathy cards, which are always difficult to make, so I appreciate sets like this.

I decided to try some simple white embossing on patterned paper. I chose a piece of watercolour patterned paper from MFT, and cut it down to the same size as my white A6 card base.

I treated the paper with an anti-static powder bag, then stamped the images with Versamark ink before covering with white embossing powder. I heat set the images, then added a sentiment from the set in the same way.

I adhered the paper to my card base, then added some simple embellishments to finish.

The white embossing is tricky to capture on camera but it’s very pretty in real life. With a different sentiment, this design would work well for a elegant wedding card.

Thanks for joining me today,

Gemma

Altenew Wildflower Garden

MFT Watercolor Wash Paper Pack

White embossing powder

Geode Art

I was really inspired by the video I shared to our Facebook page earlier this week showing the American lady who makes amazing geode art work and tables from resin and glitter.  I'd love one of the tables, but as I am unlikely to get one I thought I'd crank out a little mini art work myself using Concord and 9th's Geode stamp set from their latest release.

As I was going to use a lot of thick layers, I started with a canvas hardboard as card stock wouldn't take the weight.  You can pick these up in art stores or the Works quite inexpensively.   I stamped the geode stamp at the bottom and across the top left corner, then added the heart across the the top right and embossed them all with gold powder.   Because I wanted a super deep embossed line, I then drew over all the embossed lines with my Lawn Fawn glue pen and covered that with more powder and CAREFULLY heated that making sure not to stick the heat in any one spot for too long to avoid the glue bubbling through the powder (please take care with the fumes too - do it in a well ventilated room)  I wanted to make the bottom geode a little larger so free-handed an extra layer around the stamped image so it fell off the canvas.

Once all the embossing was set I went to work with glitter!   I pulled out all my old stickles bottles in golds, clear, greens and teals and added pearl and peacock liquid pearls too.  It's basically a case of filling up each ring as you go and adding a few dots of a second colour and swirling with a pin.  I used glossy accents as a clear medium to aid the mixing.   For the central areas I crushed some old glass beads and dropped them into glossy accents.  [Again, if you try these - word of caution - be careful crushing the glass beads.  I popped mine into a thick plastic bag and tapped gently with a hammer and used a little scoop to tip each where I wanted them - be careful you don't end up with sharp bits of broken glass on your craft table]   This layer gives you some real geode dimension.  As stickles dries quite matt, I covered those layers with more glossy accents once it had dried so the whole piece has a super shiny finish. 

I'm really pleased with the finish piece - not quite the impact of the originals that inspired me, but it will still add some fun and colour to our bathroom wall!

NEWS FROM THE STORE

• As we sold out of some Lawn Fawn items super fast - we got another order in quick and Lawn Fawn were amazing in turning it around so quickly for us, so there is a good chance we will have all the new release back in stock by Friday!

• The Neat and Tangled May release will be in store tomorrow (Monday 21st)

• The Hero Arts Summer Catalogue arrived late on Friday.  There are 8 large boxes!  We'll get it opened, processed and added to store as quickly as we can this week.

• AlteNew have a new release this week - our order is in but it hasn't shipped yet - we'll get it online as quickly as we can after release.

That's all for this week - hope you're getting some lovely sunshine where ever you are as it's glorious in Sheffield today.  Catch you next weekend.
Tara