Rose Blossom Blog Hop: It's a Paper Garden!

Hi All! Welcome to the Rose Blossom Blog Hop celebrating Close To My Heart's September Stamp Of The Month: Paper Garden.

If you just hopped over from the sweet and talented Shelly Nemitz's blog, you're in the right place. If you're just starting with me, I'll have a list of blog hop participants at the end of this post so that you can check out all the amazing inspiration the team has put together for you.

Today's card is chock full of techniques. So let's take a look.

The base of this card is a standard 4 1/4 x 5 1/2 inches cut from black cardstock. For the card front, I started with a piece of Close To My Heart's new Water Color cardstock that was cut to the same dimensions as the card base. I used CTMH's new Water Colors and Brushes to create a wash of purples using the wet on wet techniques. I used my heat gun on it to make sure it was good and dry and then splattered the paper with the purple paints I had used for the wash. I dried that with my heat gun and then stamped the large flower from the Perfect Garden stamp set in VersaMark ink. I added gold embossing powder and heat set the flower. I then cut the background to 3 3/4 x 5 inches, rounded the bottom corners, and mounted it onto a piece of White Daisy cardstock that was cut to 3 7/8 x 5 1/8 inches. (Mounting the painted piece to the white cardstock took care of any warping in the Water Color cardstock.)

For the flower embellishments, I stamped the large flower onto White Daisy cardstock using the new Eggplant ink by CTMH. I added a gold embossed center using the same embossing technique I had used on the background. I stamped the smaller flower in Thistle ink, and decided I needed an intermediate tone between the Thistle and Eggplant. So I stamped the smaller flower in Smokey Plum ink and then stamped over that with Thistle to get the color I wanted. I then added gold embossing to the center of the small flowers using and embossing ink pen and gold embossing powder. Now I could have cut these flowers out with the Artiste circut cartridge, but I decided that I didn't want the white border around them that the circut leaves, so I fussy cut them instead. Finally, I popped them up using dimensional adhesive.

Here are a couple of close-ups:

For the sentiment, I used a stamp from the new Hello Life-Cardmaking stamp set, one of three sets that Close To My Heart released today to celebrate National Stamping Month. The "hello" is stamped in black archival ink.

Here's a close-up:

Finally, I added the panel to the front of the card and then added a piece of White Daisy cardstock to the inside of the card to make it easier to write in.

Here's one more look:

I hope you enjoyed this project. Be sure to check out all of the amazing new products Close To My Heart is launching today! And now, hop on over and see what the amazingly talented Morgan Vogt has for your creative inspiration. And if you get lost along the way, here is a list of participants:

Brenda

Lynn

Marg

Shelly

Kim {that's me!}

Morgan

Cathy

Mary

Kim S.