Brand Ambassador Inspiration, Spring Botanicals- Tulip

Good morning, how was your weekend? Mine was not what I had anticipated as a workshop I was helping at got cancelled at the last minute, so I had some time to play in my own craftroom! 

Here's what I made, specifically for an old work collegue who loves red flowers!

Just before Christmas Bev used a Waffle Flower die set to create this card and so I was inspired to make this one using the same die and Spring Botanicals - Tulip.

On a panel of Mixed Media paper, I used the stencil from the die set to plan my placement of the tulips, sketching in the open areas lightly with a pencil. Next, I stamped using some masking, a bunch of Uniko's Spring Botanicals- Tulips with Memento Toffee Crunch.

Watercolours were used to paint the blooms and I was about to cut the Postage Stamp panel when I realised I'd had the stencil the wrong way around and my planned design wouldn't work!

So with a little bit of thought, I decided to cut the panel anyway and see what I got. Instead of placing my panel face down, I placed the wrong side face down into the die panel. I had initially intended to cut out each of the panels along the stitched lines and place them on a new die cut panel, but now couldn't do that but with the help of an old fashioned embossing tool and a foam mat, I sort of rescued it with some manual embossing!

To cover where the masking hadn't worked I inked through the stencil with some Mustard Seed DI, then stamped a few bits in Toffee Crunch at strategic places.

I'd purposefully left the small rectangle in the bottom right clear so that I could stamp my sentiment, Doodle Flowers in more Toffee Crunch.

The die cut panel was mounted on some black card and then onto a trimmed down 5 x 7inch white card base. The black serves to hi-light the die cut as well as masking the different white of the MM paper. I love using MM for watercolouring, but getting a base card to match is tricky. This little trick is just enough to fool your eye!

So that's about it from me for today, crafty hugs