Hi everyone, it’s Erica on the blog and I have a H-U-G-E card for you today. Ok, so it’s not huge in size, it’s the normal A2 rectangle size but let me tell you, it took me days to colour and fussy cut every single piece.

I stamped up lots of the flowers and leaves from the lovely new set Together We Bloom on Copic friendly card stock with Memento Black Tuxedo ink. Grabbing my Copics I decided on a peach colour scheme and got colouring. Now, that sounds so easy right? But in all honesty, it took me a while to get the colour combo right and even then, I needed a break in between some of them. Three days later, I was finally done. Then it was time to start fussy cutting… and boy, that took a while too. I can only do so much fussy cutting before it drives me crazy so that was another thing that took two days.

So, what to do with all these flowers you are probably wondering. Well, I had this idea of making a big bunch of them in a vase so next step was to make a vase. Using black card stock I stamped some of the brush strokes from the aptly named stamp set Brush Strokes with VersaMark and then I used a white and gold mixed embossing powered on that. This embossing powder was created by mistake actually when one of my white embossing powders got mixed in with a gold one thanks to a gust of wind (which admittedly I created by flapping something around) swept them up and there were only two options: throw them both out or make one single one out of the two. I went for the latter and it worked beautifully for this project.

Using a vase die cut I cut it out and added glossy accents to the black bits to make it look like glass.

When it came time to put the card together I cut out an A2 background panel in some peach/orange stripy patterned paper with the Darling Ribbon & Dotted Frame and adhered that to a card base. Then out came my beloved foam tape (can’t live without that stuff!) but before I added it to the backs of the flowers, I arranged them in a big round bunch until I was happy. Well, ok, happy wasn’t exactly right as it showed that I needed more flowers so out came the card stock, ink and stamps again. For the front flower I used a mask and added more leaves so it would look like they are hanging over the lip of the vase. Once all the extra bits were done, the arrangement looked much better and I took a photo of it so I would remember where each one should go.

The flowers in the back I used double sided tape and then as I built my way up to the top, I added thicker and thicker foam tape to really give some depth and layers.

Sitting back and looking at it, I decided to add some extra details with a gel pen, much like Kristina’s card which I was so inspired by. In true Erica style, I went completely and utterly overboard… and of course made it so much more difficult for myself by adding these once everything was already glued down. Not only that, I couldn’t stop myself and added some sequins too. I know, there is no stopping me, is there?? Using the awesome sequin fusion Crystal Clear I grabbed different sizes and added them in, for me, quite discreet places. Just so they would sparkle a bit but not take any focus away from the flowers.

Deciding on a sentiment was more difficult than it should have been. I couldn’t decide on one at all actually, mostly because I didn’t want to cover up the flowers after spending so much time on colouring and fussy cutting them. So, completely unlike me, I have left this one blank. Maybe my mother will get this one for Mother’s Day, who knows?

Here is the final card, what do you think?

Happy crafting and I hope you are enjoying the new release!

Hugs from Erica READ MORE