Sweet Birthday Florals

A friend of mine has a birthday this week, and this card is already on its way to her.

I took inspiration for the color scheme from her Tumblr and her artwork, and I chose these clustered blooms since they were the closest thing I had to hydrangeas, which are some of her favorite flowers. Since I don’t have the dies for this set (yet!), I had to mask the flowers. I’m not very good at arranging florals yet, and it’s particularly difficult without die-cuts, so I kept things simple. The masking left a white halo around some of the images, so I used a cotton swab cut down to a point and smushed on my ink pad to dab color into the gaps.

The pitcher is from an entirely different floral set by Clearly Besotted. I stamped it once in Simon Says Stamp Fog ink, which isn’t Copic-friendly, so the outline blurred a little when I colored in the pitcher with the lightest warm gray Copic. Once I finished coloring, I stamped over the outline twice with the Fog ink to give the pitcher a crisp edge again. (Huzzah for the invention of the stamp platform, which makes such things possible!)

I used a quilting ruler, a mechanical pencil, and a paper trimmer to measure and cut the panels on the front of the card so the floral arrangement would be perfectly centered without being too cramped and without having too much white space and so the matte would have a quarter-inch border. For a focal panel that large, a smaller matte would have looked a bit odd unless I had used two mattes, both large and small, and there just wasn’t enough room on the card base for that.

Of course, I had to make a matching envelope. I’m not entirely pleased with how the arrangement of the leaves turned out, but you can only fuss for so long before you have to commit.

Serendipitously, this week’s Simon Says Stamp Wednesday Challenge is “Anything Goes” featuring WPlus9. I had planned out this card back in May, but I only had the time to make it this past weekend — which makes it eligible to enter in the challenge.


Supplies
Stamps:  WPlus9 “Fresh Cut Florals” (all florals);  Clearly Besotted “Simple Silhouettes” (pitcher);  Papertrey Ink “Just Desserts Sentiments” (sentiment)
Ink:  VersaColor Smoke Blue, Atlantic, Celadon;  Hero Arts Cotton Candy, Pale Tomato;  Memento Toffee Crunch;  Simon Says Stamp Fog
Copics:  W00
Paper:  Papertrey Ink Stamper’s Select White
Miscellanea:  Scotch Permanent Double-Sided Tape, Post-It Labeling Tape (for masking), cotton swab


Dimensions
base:  4 ¹/₄”  x  5 ¹/₂”
focal panel:  2 ⁹/₁₆”  x  4”
matte:  3 ¹/₈”  x  4 ¹/₂”