Forever Fern

 

I’m going to start today’s post not with ferns but garlic!  We’ve been harvesting the first of our garlic and using it ‘wet’, which only means using it straight away and not leaving it out to dry.  The first bulbs I dug up were a new variety to us called Lyubasha, which is originally from the Ukraine and is quite a spicy garlic.  Aside from being very tasty in itself, it’s a hardneck variety which produces flower spikes called scapes – a bonus crop if you know what to do with them.

After a quick google search, I discovered that you can make pesto with these weird curly things, using the scapes in place of basil leaves.  The result was some delicious, uber-garlicky pesto.  I just love bonus crops!

My card this week uses the newly released Stampin’ Up! Forever Fern stamps and the coordinating Forever Flourishing dies.  Rather than standard leafy green colours, I decided on Pretty Peacock and Mint Macaron for my colour scheme.   First, to make a DSP style background, I randomly stamped the various leaves onto my card using both inks and then finished with the dotty images into any gaps.  I left a gap in the centre as that was where I was going to mount the focal image.

The next step was to stamp the greeting and cut out some of the foliage pieces using copper foil paper and some velum.

I arranged them behind the sentiment, cutting some of the pieces so that I could spread out the arrangement, and once I was happy, glued all the bits in place.

After mounting the background panel on a Pretty Peacock layer and Mint Macaron card base, I then added the sentiment piece on using dimensionals, adding smaller sections of dimensionals to support the leaf areas.