Bright and Cheerful Thinking of You Card

 

Today I have a card to share that can be made quickly with a little planning.  This card features the "A Blossom" stamp set from Close to My Heart.

My friend Joy Tracey at Obsessed With Scrapbooking is offering a special sale until next Tuesday, August 26th at 11:59 p.m.  If you place any order on her CTMH site HERE she will send you this set as a thank you gift for your order.  Do not put the set in your shopping cart - Joy will send it to you separately.

 
This stamp set coordinates with cuts from the CTMH Art Philosophy Cricut Cartridge.  The shapes for the two flowers are on the cartridge so you can cut out stamp mats for each flower.  The correct size to cut the mats is printed directly on the storage sheet.  For the later CTMH Cricut cartridges, the handbook page number for the shape is usually printed on this sheet as well.

It took me a little while to find the correct shapes in Design Space.  The CTMH cartridges are all very full sets of images and there are a lot to scroll through once you select the cartridge.

Narelle at The Non-Crafty Crafter has gone through all three CTMH booklets and added the image codes that you can use to find the images quickly.  You can download these annotated handbooks on her blog HERE.  In addition to the three CTMH cartridges, she also has annotated handbooks for When I was a Child and The First Few Years.  The annotations for those cartridges were done by Margo Jacobson.  This makes it much easier to put together the layouts from those cartridges.

Please be sure to say "thanks!" to Narelle (and Margo) in a comment if you go to her blog to download these booklets.

After you add thee two shapes to the mat, you need to resize them to the size printed on the stamp sheet.  Each of these shapes has two parts so first you will "ungroup" the shapes and deleted the pieces you don't need.

The rounded flower should be 1 3/4 inches.  Use the edit tab to change the size of the shape - just leave the ratio lock on and type the new height in the box, then click "Enter" to apply the change.

The smaller pointy flower is sized at 1 1/4 inches.

I moved the shapes close together and then "attached" them so I could cut a single sheet including some of each shape.

I changed the quantity to twelve and the shapes fit nicely into an area the size of my 8 1/2  x 11 white cardstock placed horizontally on the mat.

While I had everything set up, I cut several sheets of cardstock so I would have lots of margin for error as I stamped the flowers!  I still find it more difficult to stamp on a cut piece than to stamp on a full sheet and use a punch or a die to cut out the stamped shape.

With some practice, you can get results like the flower on the left with a nice even margin of white.  More of mine looked "whimsical" like the flower on the right with the stamping a little (or a lot) off center.  If you look at these two images, the ink on the left flower seems very blotchy.  Don't worry, it will become much smoother when it is dry like the flower on the right side.

Cutting lots of the plain white cardstock shapes gives you the freedom to try out various colors of ink and work on your technique for centering the stamps.  I find that if you can look down from directly above the stamp it is a little easier to get the placement right.

I ended up using Cotton Candy, Crystal Blue and Sunset inks for the flowers on my card.  You can find the inks on Joy's CTMH website HERE.

The glittery striped background paper is from an old DCWV stack called "Citrus."  I arranged the flowers in a group and used thin foam dots to adhere the small blue flowers and larger, thicker foam squares for the three pink flowers. 

The sentiment is stamped with the Sunset ink on a strip of green cardstock from the coordinating DCWV Citrus Cardstock stack.  The strip is centered between two of the blue glitter lines on the card.  I trimmed the ends and curled them up a bit to make a flag.

I thought the card needed more sparkle so I pulled out some tiny gems in blue, clear and pale orange and added them to the flower centers and along the sentiment strip.  I originally planned to put just three gems on the sentiment strip buy sometimes "more is more!"

The different heights of the flowers and the bling give the card a lot more personality.

This card is so bright and full of sparkle that I think it should cheer anyone up!

Whenever I cut coordinating shapes for the CTMH stamp sets I cut a lot and keep the blank shapes stored in the stamp set envelope.  Then if I want to make a card in a hurry I can just get right to stamping and assembling the card.  If there are shapes that you use often you can keep a list and then cut lots of them in one sitting every so often.

There is a new CTMH Cricut cartridge called "Artfully Sent" that is expected to be available next month.  It is a cartridge full of cards and I can't wait to try it out!  Be sure to watch Joy's blog for an announcement when it is available to order.

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