My first Card With Flower Soft

I got my Flower Soft from Our Daily Bread Designs yesterday, and didn't have time to try it, so as soon as I could today, I made a card.

I knew I wanted to use my Heartfelt Creations die by Spellbinders to make a window with a flowery scene behind it. This design in one of my sheets of toile CS looked like it would work perfectly for it. I cut the scene out a little larger than the opening in the die cut and colored it lightly with colored pencils. Then I applied Flower Soft to every tree and plant in the scene. My Flower Soft is the Bouquet box, which has seven colors in it, and I was so excited to finally get it that I used all of them! :-) The set didn't have any green, so I decided I would make a flowering tree in honor of spring. The Flower Soft looks much more subtle in person than it does in the photograph.

I mounted the scene on some paper I bought by the sheet at an art supply store. This paper has a subtle pattern that reminds me of wallpaper around the window. The paper was mounted onto white CS using my Xyron before I adhered the scene to it.

I outlined the teardrops on the die cut with a Pen Touch pen, and mounted it over the scene with dimensional tape after cutting out the cross pieces in the window.

Everything is mounted on ordinary purple CS which is mounted on a white card. I added Queen & Co pearls to brighten up the purple a bit.

Pink Roses Card

All of the flowers really are a salmon shade of pink to match the design in the background paper, but some of them look red, and some look lavender in the photograph.

Before my husband got laid off, I was looking through the book they order supplies from at our closest craft store. I was actually looking for a certain Martha Stewart border punch I see on a lot of European cards, but I never see that punch in the US. Well, it wasn't in the book, but I did find this Heartfelt Creations Die by Spellbinders that I've been wanting for a long time, and also the Martha Stewart Branch punch so I ordered them. They came in last week, so we picked them up on Sunday. They had also gotten the McGill branch punch, which is very similar to the MS one, but it is a bit larger.

I have seen comments at SCS and other places where people were wondering what the difference is. Well of course since they were different sizes by a small amount, I bought both of them. It's sort of nice to have one that is a bit larger, I like the size of the McGill one better, but I think I will use the MS one more because it is much easier to punch. I tend to sit down with scraps and punch leaves and flowers a lot, so I have a bunch ready to use. I really need to be able to turn the punch over to make sure I'm not punching over parts of the paper that are already punched. With the MS one, this is easy, you can just squeeze the punch while it's upside down. With the McGill punch, you have to set it down on the table and really use a lot of force to punch with it. I guess it's not really a big deal, but the MS one is so easy to punch with that I tend to punch a lot more branches at a time than I do with the McGill one. I'm still glad I have both though, it will give me more variety!

For this card, I chose an Anna Griffin dp for the background. It was a salmony shade of pink, so I chose the most salmony shades of Prima and Recollections flowers I had. I mounted the dp onto generic salmon and white, then added the white die cut.

I added some of the branches before the flowers, and some after. I started with daisies, but after I applied them and started adding other things, they looked very flat, so I scrunched up some little Recollections flowers and layered them over the daisies.

The roses around the center are my favorite discontinued Prima ones. I curled the stems around my embossing tool point to make curly tendrils. I did find those little roses are still available from Wild Orchid Crafts in the UK,and they ship to the US and are much cheaper, so hopefully, when my husband gets working again I can place an order. Then I will have all of the colors I wanted originally!

The card needed something around the outside, so since I didn't have any salmony colored perals, I colored some white ones with Copics.

I can't quite decide whether I really like this card or not, it looks sort of messy to me.