Golden Daffodils

 

This week, the little mini daffodils started to flower in our garden.  I love their cheerful blooms and they give you hope that spring will be on the way soon.  We do have the standard sized daffs too but our garden is very windy and the big ones often get a bit battered.  These daffodils inspired today’s card that I made for my mother-in-law’s birthday.

I wasn’t sure where I was going with this but I wanted to start by creating a stained-glass effect.  I stamped and gold heat-embossed the main daffodil image from Visible Image’s Golden Daffodil stamp set onto vellum.

On the reverse side, I coloured the blooms and leaves using alcohol markers.  They didn’t show up very much so I went over them again using Sharpie pens, which you can get to blend a little on vellum.  The colours were much more vibrant.

To decorate the background, which was the square card blank, I lightly stencilled Distress Oxide Twisted Citron through the Leafy stencil.

My original plan was to cut a hole in the card front and mount the vellum in the aperture but the card blank became too wobbly and distorted after it’s trip through the Big Shot.  Plan B then!  I die-cut the vellum and a white circle of card and, holding the two tightly together, punched small holes through both layers around the perimeter.  Taking a length of yellow ribbon, I wove this through the holes which secured the vellum to the card without the problem of trying to hide adhesive.

The circle was mounted on the card blank using Stix 2 thin foam tape.  The sentiment is from the newly released Best Birthday Ever stamp set and was gold heat-embossed on white card, then backed with gold foil card and attached using foam tape.  I used the solitary daffodil bloom to decorate the envelope, colouring it with Copic markers.  To finish, I added some yellow enamel shapes and some pale green pearls.