Celebrate with Flowers

For the August technique class at The Craft Shack I wanted to do something different & found a tutorial on SCS by Mary Dimercurio Prasad called Faux Glass Flowers.  I was a little nervous at first (or afraid I'd burn my fingers) but thought I'd give it a try.  I made flowers but I also saw a few samples with butterflies in the SCS gallery & I think dragonflies would be pretty too.

I followed Mary's tutorial by using Tim Holtz's Tattered Florals Die but instead of plastic packaging I used a sheet of Clear Scraps Acrylic  which is a little heavier.  I made several flowers using cranberry & sunshine yellow alcohol ink on two of them and purple twilight & sunshine yellow (sparingly) on the other two.  I also used a small  amount of pearl mixative & a little blending solution to move the colors around.  To get the effect I wanted I went over it a few times adding a few more drops of ink each time.  Once dried I stamped half of them with a dot background & the other half with a script background in StazOn black ink.  I used a sponge dauber to add a little StazOn to the edges.  Once dry, I held the flowers with tweezers & doing 1 or 2 petals at a time, held them in front of my heat tool until I could see the petal start to move.  I pulled it away & gently curled it until it was where I wanted it.  CAUTION - do not get your fingers in front of the heat gun or you will burn them!  If you don't like how they look you can re-heat & shape again.  To finish the flowers off, I placed a drop or 2 of sunshine yellow ink directly on the pearl brad & clear gem then placed them in the center of the flowers.  I layered the larger flowers by adding the brad using a hole reamer & added the gems using a couple of glue dots on the smaller flowers.

To finish the card, I used my Misti to stamp "celebrate" from Tim Holtz's Handwritten Sentiments in black Memento.  Then I masked the word with a piece of torn copy paper & again using my Misti stamped SU Brushstrokes in peeled paint & lightly sponged the edges in the same ink.  The leaves are die cut from Tim Holtz's Garden Greens in SU Old Olive & sponged with peeled paint.  I then placed the leaves & small flower on the SU Elegant Eggplant base.

Fun technique but definitely a card that you would hand deliver.  It would also be neat in a shadow box, a jewelry project or even a little girl's headband!

TFL!!