Bouquet of Birthday Wishes!

 It felt good to sit down and make a few cards this morning. I had been away Thursday and Friday down at BYU for the annual PTA Convention. Many of the talks and classes were inspiring, but I found the most inspiration when a few of us skipped class and headed over to the Museum of Fine Art instead. Shhhhhh....don't tell anyone. I will share some of my inspired pieces later. The inspiration for today's card comes from my daughter's dance recital on Saturday night. She did such an amazing job and won 1 of the 2 awards for Excellence. It came as such a surprise for her and for us! She is a great dancer!  Well...there was a brother of one of the dancer's in the audience holding a bouquet of flowers for his sister wrapped in bold, black and white striped tissue that is so popular right now. It looked gorgeous! Of course I had to get to work creating my own beautiful bouquet. I actually made two cards and they will be going to two of the ladies in my book club who have birthdays this week.

 The stamp sets that I used were "Rosie Posie" and it's accompanying shadow set "Rosie Posie 2". I also used the sentiment from "Ruby Rose" which is one of my all time favorites.  To get started, I simply diecut a large quantity of all of the images. Since I was making two cards and I didn't know exactly what I would need, I just cranked those babies out.  Before I stamped the images, I heat embossed the hexagon strip at the bottom of a piece of vellum using gold embossing powder.

 Once I was done with that, I chose my inks and got to work. It really worked up fast when I got all of the colors picked out. These are the colors that I used: (PTI) New Leaf, Simply Chartreuse and Limeade Ice (SU!) Melon Mamba, Ruby Red, Pumpkin Pie, Really Rust, Old Olive, Summer Sun, Crushed Curry)  They all worked up well with just the right "shadow".  The pattern paper is actually a strip of double sided Martha Stewart Halloween paper. Yay for versatility, right?

I arranged the leaves and flowers in a pleasing way without doing too much pre-planning or fussing. Since I was trying to go for a bouquet feel, it could be a little hap hazard, if you will. After I got done, I realized that I probably shouldn't have been so hasty, since now I knew I wouldn't be able to fit the sentiment without running the risk of getting black ink on the flowers. I simply stamped a piece of white cardstock and slid it into place. It worked out all right. In fact, I actually stamped directly onto the vellum of the second card and it wasn't as crisp, so in the end, this looked better.  The finishing touch was a sprinkling of dew drops, a few sequins for shine and a nice little bow using charcoal baker's twine to tie it up! I'll pop these in the mail today! Thanks for fluttering by!