Purple Pansy Petal Power!

I love this card - it turned out so much better than my brain imagined it - I just went with the creative flow and it all worked out this time!

I bought this Clear Dollar Stamp sets specifically to use for my MIL's birthday. She is a gardener at heart. She actually worked with disabled gardeners until her retirement and then continued to run a monthly club for them to attend.

If you haven't seen these flower of the month and flower sets at Clear Dollar Stamps then check them out - they have so much punch and variety within them.

I started this card out by using my Pansy set and coloring it with my copics - well actually that's not quite what happened. I started out this card with the intent on using my twinkling H2O's to create a luminous card that I knew my MIL would love. I painstakingly colored my main image and all the while not truly liking how it was turning out... Yikes! This really wasn't speaking to me. So knowing I was up against it and really needed to get this done I changed course and went back to my trusted copics and stamped and colored again - oh, yes! that really is much better. So the flower was colored and a nice sky halo of blue added to help it "pop".

Oh dear, now what. I looked at my Flower of the month set... I want to use the script... hmmm do I mask the image and use it? That doesn't seem quite right for what I am wanting. So I decided to create a background with the set using the script. On thinking it out I thought the script alone would be "too" masculine so I added the flowers, playing about with the placement using the stamps and the projected image in my head (no image available - just clutter in there!) and decided to stamp the image in a row of three and working out that if I turned the stamp 180 that it would fit together in the middle of the page rather nicely. Then I added another row of script stamping. I used the London Fog grey because I just wanted a softened reference to the original image. I colored in the pansies on my background just using the lightest of the colors I had used with my original image. I looked at my background and thought it needed something. There is just something about "script" that always screams antique to me - so I dug out my Distressed Ink inkpads and found Faded Linen and a sponge and just sponged over the entire background.

Afterwards I was playing with a layout idea and thought I would need a sentiment - I decided to use Brilliance Victorian purple and clear embossing on my sentiment to match the mounts of the image and the card. I wanted it to have a different sheen to it to stand out slightly from the background itself. Then I used the Swiss dots embossing folder for the entire background - that took three passes - I was thinking about using another folder but I wasn't certain I could get the pattern to match. I set my background aside to work some more on my main image.

I had stamped and colored my main imaged on a 4.25 in x 5.5 in sheet of cardstock. I wanted to use one of my Nestability sets - so after going through them all! I decided on one and used the next size for the mount...hmmm... I decided to embossing the image layer... now what? It doesn't really pop like I want - so out came the Distress Inks and sponge again and I used the die as a mask. On the mount layer it just seemed to need something to tie it together a bit more so I used the inside of the die as a guide to put down some faux stitching.

I decided to make the effort to match up the inside of the card too -

I decided I wanted to repeat the usage of my stamps again to mirror the front of the card. I first stamped the main image pansy in the center of the back of the card and the the sentiment in purple then I used the FotM pansies for the bottom corner and the script stamp across the bottom. It just felt like it still needed something so I softly colored in the pansies to match the front! It was then I decided to stop.

Ingredients

Card Size - 8.5 in x 5.5 in

Cardstock - Bazzill, Neenah

Stamps - Clear Dollar Stamps Pansy and Pansy Flower of the Month; Kitchen Sink Stamps Whole Family

Ink - Memento Tuxedo Black, London Fog, Grape Jelly; Brilliance Victorian purple; Distress Inks Antique Linen

Copics - BV00, BV02, BV04, BV08, Gooo, Goo, G14, G17, Y11, Y15, Y17

Cuttlebug Swiss Dots

Nestabilities