I have quite a bit of time to play this weekend, and I am enjoying every minute of it. There are a few challenges about to close, so I thought I would combine two challenges with this card. The ‘Colour Throwdown’ and ‘Simon Says Stamp Monday challenge’.

The first challenge is to use the colours green, black and gold, and the second challenge was to use hand-made flowers. When I want to use gold, I see cards as being quite decadent, and sumptuous, and then thought how I could incorporate flowers and decadence.

I returned to my roots, by using quite a few of my Sue Wilson dies. I have a few of her flower sets, and wanted a solid flower for this card. I also spied my Corner Garden from Stampin Up – I haven’t used that for a while.

I started with a brown Kraft base card of 8” square, used my Sue Wilson stitched squares for the layers of black, green, then black again. I used my embossing buddy over the smallest square, and stamped the ‘Corner Garden’ stamp with my Ranger Perfect Medium, using a Cosmic Shimmer ‘Detail Gold’ and heat embossed the image. The image didn’t come all the way across the bottom of that square, so I decided to use my flowers to cover the blank area to the bottom left. I usually put my flowers on the bottom right corner, so this is a little change for me.

To get the flowers to match the gold of the embossing powder, I covered a piece of black card with ‘Be Creative’ double sided sticky tape, added the same gold embossing powder, and heat set it. I then cut out several sizes of the flowers from ‘Perfect Peony complete Petals’, so I could put several layers on the flowers. I curled the edges of the petals slightly, and layered them together to create three flowers. I like the way the embossing with this tape isn’t completely smooth, I think the added texture gives some more interesting detail to the flowers. I didn’t put anything in the middle of the flowers as I couldn’t think of anything which would work, so left them as is.

I then used the remainder of the gold embossed black card to cut out the leaves from the matching set ‘Perfect Peony Open Petals’. I didn’t want the leaves solid, as I felt it would cover too much of the base card, so only used the outline dies.

I added the flowers and the leaves to the card with Pinflair Glue gel, so I could manipulate their position, and insert the leaves where I wanted them. I did move them around that corner a few times until I was happy with the placement of them.

The sentiment is from ‘Paperartsy’ and is part of a guest designer collection. The set has a number not a name – ELB05 – is has 6 sentiments relating to flowers, some of the quotes from William Blake, and Henri Matisse. I chose the one I used as it fit the open space perfectly. I used my Perfect Medium again, and the same gold embossing powder.

I was nervous to stamp it, but I stamped it using my Misti, before I added the flowers – just in case. I find the Misti has made me use stamps more than I ever have as I can just go over the image again and again if it hasn’t stamped well.

I was tempted to use some dew drops, some other embellishments – but I restrained myself, and am overall liking what it came out like. I liked the clean lines of the card base and the layers, leaving the eye to be drawn to the flowers, stamp and sentiment.

It felt good to get back to my die-cutting roots with the Sue Wilson dies, and also incorporating some newer stamp sets from Stampin Up and Paperartsy. As always – loving embossing!