Sunflower Card

Did you ever have one of those days...when nothing worked quite the way you thought it would? Today was like that for me. I had great ambitions for all the things I would get done - too many ambitions it turns out! I dealt with a lot of errands and house "stuff" (laundry, etc.) and then I thought I'd make a "quick" card.



I wanted to use this cut from the "A Child's Year" cartridge - another great design that has nothing to do with silhouettes of children (the variety and versatility of this cartridge is truly wonderful!). I inked the edges of the card - in part to disguise those score tick marks (which I will delete in Design Studio as soon as this cartridge is added to the program). I am not an inker, I just don't usually do it, and this became painfully obvious as I worked on the card. It looked "OK" when I had just done the edges but then I decided I wanted to emphasize the cut outs in the front of the card



I tried using a dauber for the first time - clearly this wasn't the right tool (or I was not using it properly). While I had an interesting stencil pattern left on the scrap beneath the card - the top was not a "thing of beauty" - in fact, quite the opposite.



But I carried on - attempting to make the best of my blotchy inking! I put adhesive on the three flower areas so I could adhere the one and one-half inch circles I had punched to back them.



Here the circles are in position. Then I added the backing paper to fill in the leaf and stems. These were both Debbie Mumm papers from a stack I got at Joann Fabrics. My card was cut at 5.5 inches to make a standard A2 card and the backing paper was 4 3/4 x 3 3/4 inches.



Here is a photo of the card at this point - I thought it loooked terrible with my messy inking and no dimension - so I thought I'd try adding some buttons to the centers.



(Slight digression here...I love buttons and have collected them since childhood. When we lived in England I always looked for old buttons at the car boot sales and secondhand shops. I have tins and tins of them!)



I settled on some rounded "flower" shaped orangey-yellow buttons, looked around for some string to tie through them and then "auditioned" them on the card. I still didn't like the result.



I remembered the perfect little cutouts of the flowers on the face of the card and decided to try those.



Here is the card with just the cut out flowers - with the petals folded up and placed at a slight turn from the cut in the base.



I then decided to "go big or go home" and add the buttons too - maybe that would be enough to distract attention from the inking!



The flowers really "popped" once I had the cutouts and the buttons layered.



Here is the card that I ended up with - my "quick" little project ended up taking waay too long and keeping me up too late even though I am normally a night owl. (and I am definitely going to read up on and ask my friends about inking techniques!)