The Toadstool Garden (by Lorraine)

This is a beautiful stamp, which really lends itself to large format cards. There are so many possibilities - stamped in its entirety and coloured, decoupaged over various elements, or simply using elements from within the design.

For this example, I took a piece of cotton rag paper and coloured the background using a variety of Distress Oxide colours. I kept applying ink, then adding a spritz of water until I was happy with the result. I made sure that it was completely dry before stamping the image using my stamp press. As the surface is quite textured, this allowed me to stamp several times to get a good depth of image. I then embossed with fine detail clear powder - I find this enhances the image and provides a better outline for colouring.

I decided to pick out just a couple of details to use as focal points - the toadstools and the flowers seemed the obvious choice to me, but there is plenty of smaller detail which would also work well. I used my pencils to add colour and shading. I also applied some glitter, although this doesn't show too well on the picture.

I mounted the cotton rag onto black paper, with the edge deckled to mimic the rough edge, as I though it didn't suit a more formal square or rectangular mount. Finally, I used a strong adhesive to adhere it to a large card. The cotton rag tends to be quite absorbent, so a belt and braces approach works best to ensure that your masterpiece doesn't fall apart before it reaches your lucky recipient!