Glorious Flowers (by Judith)

Hello everyone, I have a few projects to share with you today showcasing the fabulous new stamps that we brought to last month's TV shows on Hochanda. Myself and the Design Team had great fun creating some samples with these stamps, and hopefully you will be inspired to make something yourselves when you see what the Team have been up to.

My first two cards use the same stamp as the focal point, but show what very different looks you can achieve with the same stamp. For my first card, I created a bold background, adding texture paste through a Chocolate Baroque Strip Stencil, and then stamped images from Make your Mark using coordinating colours, plus black ink for the circles. I chose to stamp the words in grey ink for a softer effect. The circles are just the right size to add these word collections, and I will be using this effect a lot for backgrounds, as I really like how it looks.

I took a smaller piece of card and stamped the seed pods and masked them with Masking Tissue. I then stamped the Square Bubbles and added colour as before. I took away the Masking Tissue and coloured the image with pencils, and added some grey shading along the edge of the image with a pencil for dimension.

For my second card, I coloured a piece of book paper with pale coloured Distress Ink and stamped the seed pod again several times up one side, masking it each time to create  a cluster of pods. I added the small flower sprigs from the same Glorious stamp set, and coloured everything with pencils. I edged the book paper with Seedless Preserves Distress Ink.

I stamped the single leaf and flower sprig randomly across a larger piece of kraft card, using green and purple Versafine Clair inks, and also stamped the sentiment onto a small piece of kraft card. These pieces of card were also edged with Seedless Preserves Distress Ink.

My final card uses the large fantasy flower from the Glorious stamp set. I stamped the image onto a piece of cotton fabric using Archival Ink. I coloured the image with Inktense pencils, and blended them with a waterbrush. I frayed the edges of the fabric and adhered it to a layer of dark card using strong double sided tape.

I created the background using a piece of drawing cartridge stained with tea, but you could use Distress Ink, or any other water based medium, it's up to you. I like the speed of running a wet tea bag over the drawing cartridge, and tend to colour several pieces in one go, as I make a jug of tea especially for this purpose. I then have lots of backgrounds ready for future projects.

I stamped a couple of images from Make Your Mark randomly over the background, giving the loose impression of cracked plaster, by sticking to a warm brown colour palette.

I will be back later in the month with more projects to share with you, thanks for stopping by,

Judith xx