Paternal Bonsai

Our Design Team theme this week is Father’s Day and I’ve made a clean and simple card for my Dad.   He loves a bonsai tree, as do I.   They are so majestic despite being miniature.  When seeing them at gardening shows, I’m always amazed as to how old they are.   When I was young, I grew an orange tree from a pip and Dad suggested we grow it on as a bonsai.  It lived for many years on the kitchen windowsill in its little pot.

For my bonsai card, I started by stamping the tree from Resilient Bonsai in Versafine Clair Pinecone ink and clear heat-embossing.  I heat-embossed the pot part again, this time using Versamark and gold powder.

After smooshing some Distress Inks on a block, I sprayed them with water and added some colour to the tree.  I watercoloured the pot using metallic gold paint.

After fussy-cutting the tree and pot, the white edges of the trunk were visible so I used a brown marker pen to darken these up.

The pot was glued onto the tree bottom to give more dimension.  I also added a few gold highlights onto the trunk and canopy of the tree to tie in with the pot.

For the background, I lightly drew a pencil line off-centred down a 5” square of card to guide the stamping of the oriental script.  As this was the background, to make it a little more subtle than heat-embossing gold powder, I stamped in gold ink, added clear embossing powder over and heat-set.  The pencil line was then erased.

I positioned the tree over the script in my MISTI whilst I lined up the sentiment.  This Father’s Day sentiment is from Time To Par-tee.  I’ve snipped the Father’s and Day apart so that the words mirror the tree shape.  Once happy with the arrangement, I removed the tree and stamped with Versamark, added gold embossing powder and heat-set.

As I was mounting this on a black card blank, I cut a paper insert and added a little stamping.

The tree was adhered to the panel using foam tape for dimension and matted on green and gold foil card.  The black card blank frames the panel beautifully.