PaperShapez

For the past few years, my friend Lisa and I have been meeting for coffee every Sunday morning at exactly 10am. Part of our meeting involves a challenge in which each of us has to bring a hand made card or other hand crafted item to exchange. This challenge was initiated way back when to keep us both motivated as, heaven knows, I’ve lost my mojo more than a few times and even went so far as to sell every stamping item I owned (big, big mistake!). Anyway, Lisa and I just signed up to be SU demos and, in her kit, Lisa received the set called ‘Big Flowers’. She immediately passed it on to me and challenged me to make something with it. Now, I have to be completely honest here; I looked at the stamps sitting on my kitchen counter for five days before I even opened the lid. I was at a loss as to what to do with them. I knew in my mind that I wanted to make a bouquet of some sort but I only had two ink colors to work with – Tangerine Tango and Kiwi Kiss – so how on earth was I going to make something look good with only two colors? In my personal opinion, a minimum of three colors are needed in order to make something really pop.

So, last night as I was gorging on a feed of homemade chicken wings (hey, I was starving myself on a sulfite free diet all week and was HUNGRY) I had an epiphany. I could use versamark and clear embossing powder on Baja Blue cardstock to obtain my third color! I wiped the grease from my fingers (and my chin) and tore to my craft room to create my bouquet.

Once I began embossing, I was unstoppable! I embossed every flower in the set on to Blue Baja, Kiwi Kiss, and Tangerine Tango cardstock. And, then I had another epiphany! Throw in a little white to make the colors pop even more! Whoohoo, I was on a roll. After all was said and done, I was extremely pleased with the way my flowers turned out. But still, something was missing. It needed a vase. So, off to my computer I went to draw one up. Once I had it cut out, I embossed flowers onto that too, haha.

Oh yes, I also forgot to mention that I only had one circle punch in my possession – a 1 3/8 inch. So, I drew up a series of 1.5 inch circles and 1.75 inch scallop circles and cut them out using my silhouette machine. You’d never ever know that they weren’t punched.