Build a flower

I love to make my own embellishments to use on both my cards and my scrapbook pages, whilst there are lots of beautiful embellishments on the market out there, I think there is always something extra special about creating your own embellishments - they are unique, you can adapt / match them to your project (and you can recreate as many as you want at a fraction of the cost!!)  For today's project I chose to use three of the stamps from the Sugar and Spice 'love and laughter' set to make a handmade flower embellishment which I've used on this birthday card:

The Love and Laughter set is one of my favourite sugar and spice sets - to make my flower I've used both the shadow flower stamp and the overlying petal stamp.  I stamped the shadow shape onto red patterned card using crimson versafine ink, then stamped the petal shape twice onto matching pink paper. I cut around the shadow shape and the first petal shape.   For the second stamped petal shape, I cut just inside the stamped shape so it was slightly smaller.  I then inked all the edges, again using crimson and sepia versafine ink.  I then used a foam pad and placed the first petal shape on top of the shadow shape.  I then curled the edges of the second petal shape and using another foam pad placed this on top of the other two stamped shapes.  To finish I used the small circle stamp which I covered in distress stickle glitter and when dry, glued this on top to hold all the petal shapes together.

To make the card I used a red card blank, sprayed a chipboard tag with glimmer mists and inked the edges.  I cut a strip of green card and used a martha stewart border punch on both sides of the strip.  I tore a page from an old book and glimmer misted it, placing it inside the punched strip.  I then ruched a strip of ribbon and attached this underneath my tag.  I stamped the happy birthday greeting from the love and laughter set onto the tag and glued my flower and a couple of leaves into place on top.

Thanks for looking,
big smiles, Nic xo