Crafty As L

My cards this week were made using the fabulous sunflower die that came with Issue 102 of Die-Cutting Essentials.   I was particularly taken with the octagonal card on the front cover, made by Nicky Gilburt, editor of Creative Stamping.    First, I die-cut the sunflower and used it as a stencil to create the backgrounds. Next, I stencilled again onto another piece of white card.   Then I trimmed around the sunflower outline and glued it over the stencilled flower. Using the nested notched octagon dies by Creative Craft Products, I die-cut the background panels, then a coloured layer.   The card base was a 7” square card blank that I simply die-cut. The sunflower toppers were fussy-cut and then mounted on a coloured rectangle to match the coloured layer.   This was then adhered to a white rectangle. The cards were finished by attaching the sunflower topper using foam tape, adding a sentiment and embellished with some enamel dots.  

Summer is a great time to be out in the garden: there’s a wealth of colour, flowers, birds and insects to feast your eyes on.  I particularly enjoy growing plants that are beneficial for both me and the wildlife and one of those essentials is sunflowers.  I don’t grow the 10ft monsters for a few reasons; they require too much faffing around with, you only get a solitary flower on them, albeit huge, and our garden is very windy so it would likely get broken.  My favourite sunflower to grow is ‘Vanilla Ice’.  It’s a multi-branched variety, so lots of flowers for the vase and the wildlife, it’s really easy to grow and it flowers for months. A little bee on my 'Vanilla Ice' sunflower The Painted Harvest stamp set features a great water-coloured sunflower image and is also easy to create stunning cards with.  It’s a multi layered stamp and I usually use a second-generation image for the back layer by stamping off onto scrap paper first but with the yellow ink, it’s n...