Clouds of Cosmos

Good morning folks.

There's a brand new challenge starting over at Uniko and here is my inspiration for you.

You might be able to guess what the theme is this time -

My inspiration is a little bit literal bearing in mind the photo above!
I chose the Pure Florals Cosmos stamp to create my little scene, masking and stamping to get the mass effect. I then coloured them with a mixture of DI and Zig watercolor pens quite loosley, before fussy cutting the arrangement and adding it to my Brusho coloured panel on foam pads. The vibrant turquoise I used for the sky contrasts with the soft pink of the cosmos blooms and the green at the bottom suggests the foliage and grass. I simply sprinkled the crystals onto some MM paper and spritzed with water, then allowed it to dry and cut my panel with a stitched rectangle die.
To finish I added the sentiment from the same set stamped on a strip of matching card.

I love Cosmos and have them growing in the garden, they go on and on producing their dainty blooms amongst the ferny foliage all summer long. Last year they were a bit like Quatermas, as they grew to be over 4ft in places but after checking the seed packet I realised that they were just a tall variety, so ensured that I went for a dwarf version this year!

Check out the rest of the team here for more flowery inspiration.




    
Summer Colours                                       Earth Laughs in Flowers

Uniko challenge

Morning peeps.
The year is whizzing by and it's time for a brand new challenge over at Uniko.
This time we have a really simple theme with a little twist. Here's my take.

Can you guess the theme? It's -

For my inspiration, I was drawn to the colour of the leaves in this glorious pic.
After such a hot summer the leaves are just turning crispy and missing out on the glorious colour changes we normally see, though there are plenty of berries in the hedgerows. The rowans, hollies and hawthorns are laden with bright red berries so from a distance you get a shimmer of red over the whole hedge. The fieldfares, thrushes, blackbirds and others will have a feast! Conkers were raining down on Wednesday with the very strong winds courtesy of Storm Ali and so was the beech mast. In fact some landed on my windscreen as I drove to Sainsbugs and an acorn or some such landed with a fair old ping on the card roof too!

Anyway back to the card. I started by dripping some Copic refill ink onto Yupo paper and left it to dry. Think I was a little too generous with the ink as it left ridges on the panel as it dried.
When dry, I used the Nature's Treasures II stencil with Dreamweaver gold embossing paste to create my  pattern. It took awhile as I had to leave each leaf stalk time to dry, if the stencil comes into contact with the paste when even damp it lifts it off. It did happen to me but I managed to hide the offending boo boo under the sentiment strip! I even quite liked how the texture showed through from the background panel in the end.

As I said earlier my gold embossed sentiment strip, using So Much, was laid across the completed panel, carefully masking my 'tiny' error!

My second card uses the same stencil but this time I used DOx ink in Spiced Marmalade, Fossilized Amber and Abandoned Coral, to colour a white panel. The Camouflaged HELLO was cut from the inked panel and again from brown fun foam before replacing all the bits back into the spaces on the panel after the Beautiful script was stamped. A few sequins complete the card. Very simple to do.

OK, that's it from me but please check out the team here as well as our GD for the month, the wonderfully talented Hannelie at Desert Diva

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You have until midnight GMT on Friday 26th October to enter and the winner will be announced on Friday 2nd November, 8.00am GMT

Check out the Uniko blog for all the Ts and Cs.

I'd like to join in over at:-

  
Hope stencils apply too!

Uniko Challenge, Meadow Birthday

Morning all. 

It was a busy week for the Uniko DT last week but after a bit of a chill session and a 'bit' of housework, I'm back with a card to announce the new challenge over at Uniko.

The design was based on this rather appropriate photo.

I started by creating a background to echo the pattern on the suitcase with the Stylised Flower stencil and some Twisted Citron DOx on a die cut panel of white card.
The next step was to cut an oval of black card and stamp and emboss the greeting from Birthday Sentiments. To frame it I stamped and cut out two of the small sprays from Originally Organic Additions and some of the flowers. I wanted to create an even spray so not satisfied with using the same image I mirror stamped two more onto previously die cut sprays.
If you are not familiar with mirror stamping, all it is is stamping first onto a larger stamp then use this image to create a mirror image by stamping the image onto card. The resultant image is a little paler than the original but a fine liner soon sorts that out! There's lots of videos around such as here, here and here that explain the process.
I coloured the sprays with Copics using the colours from The Paper Players as close as possible and completed the wreath around the oval.

So are you ready to play along?

Well, just in case you need some more incentive to play along with the challenge here are the details of the prizes.

  
THE PRIZES

• Main Winner Chosen By the DT - £25 eGift Certificate
• Random Twist Winner - £4 In Stock Clear Stamp Set of Winners Choosing
• Random Uniko Stamps Winner - £4 In Stock Clear Stamp Set of Winners Choosing
• Top 3 Chosen By DT - 150 Loyalty Reward Points

You've got plenty of time to play along with this month's challenge. The deadline for submission is midnight (GMT) on Friday 22nd June 2018 (7.00pm EDT).

OK, that's about it from me but check out the rest of the team for more inspiration here.

GD Sue
Bev
Carol 

Deborah 
Izzy 

Julie - that's me
Linda

Joining in over at:-

     


Stencil It!