Elemental Inspiration for April

Morning All!

Hope you're feeling 'full of the joys of Spring' this sunny Friday morning!

Every day this week I've sat at my computer all geared up to updating my blog, and every day something has diverted my attention.  I'd just made a coffee and sat down today to make a start when I glanced out of the window to see the Grocery delivery van already outside - 30 minutes early - you see, it's really not my fault!

Anyway, with the groceries put away I'm back here (with my coffee now just lukewarm), but hopefully there'll be no more interruptions until I've hit the publish button!

  

It is of course, Daring Cardmakers day and as it's the first Friday of the month

Nat's here with April's Elemental Inspiration dare.
As always, you need to interpret three elements from the image on your card, should you choose to use the colours, the colour scheme counts as one element .

There are lots of lovely details to choose from, so the only problem will be deciding which to go for! ;)

To get you started, check out f the gorgeous projects the design team have created!

From Nat's beautiful moodboard, I chose to use the colour palette, the distressed wood effect on the frame (centre, lower line) and the vase of flowers to make my card.

In my ever-growing collection of digital paper download sets

designs I have this fabulous set from RomanticLetters, perfect to use to make the background for my card.  I LOVE this Etsy shop - there are masses of gorgeous paper sets etc to download and at the moment they have a sale on.  Beware!

WhiteWoodTextures by RomanticLetters

Info

I resized my chosen design so it would print at 14.5cms sq, then rotated by 180 (so it would be the right way up when I folded my card) and printed it onto a sheet of my usual white 350gsm A4 card.  

I folded and creased along the top edge of the design and trimmed down to create my card base.  

Next I resized the same paper to 8xms sq and printed it out on a textured White Bazzill card for the top layer.

I then chose another paper design with mostly cream shades and cropped it down to just the cream coloured area.  I resized to about 11cms sq  and printed as before

Once I'd got the central panel to the size I wanted I cut the cream one to just a small amount bigger, inked the edges of both quite heavily, glued them onto the base card.

For the flowers I inked up scraps of the same Bazzill card in the colours of the flowers, and a couple more pieces in green shades for the leaves.  I like using inked-up card for die-cutting as you get a bit of variation, texture and a lot more say over the end colour result.

I used various die sets for the leaves as I needed quite small ones and wanted a variety of shapes.  The flowers are cut with an ancient "Cherry Blossom" set from Spellbinders which I think is discontinued - a shame as its a fab and really useful set with loads of different sized petals plus some branch shapes.

For the vase there was more inking of card, this time building up the colour with olive green, silver and a not-quite-black over the top. I added a piece of chipboard behind the vase before gluing into place.

Then it was just about sticking a few leaves in place, shaping the flowers a little with a ball tool then adding them to the picture. More leaves were added afterwards to fluff out the bouquet. 

The sentiment is a rub-on - I cannot remember the last time I used a commercially made rub-on, I went off them because they so often disappointed in the way they came off everywhere except where I wanted them.  Thankfully this one worked perfectly!

The dots on the flowers are just added with a fine pen

That's it for this time.  I know I've gone on a bit about the digital stuff, I think I'm on a bit of a mission to extol how wonderful and versatile they are!

If you've not tried them out, you really should, you know 😊

Thanks for looking in today

Happy Crafting!