Sending Love Hydrangea

Happy Monday to you! Thanks for spending a bit of your day here with me in my corner of the internet. Today starts our new challenge at A Blog Named Hero, and as our namesake suggests, it’s all about Hero Arts! To make it especially easy to join this month’s challenge, we’ve made it anything goes. As long as it goes with Hero Arts. 🙂

Here’s my card for this month’s challenge. It features the newish Large Hydrangea Stamp and coordinating dies. I just love hydrangeas, and one day I hope to live somewhere where I can grow them in my yard and/or garden. A girl’s got to have dreams, right?

Here are the steps to create this card:

• Stamp the hydrangea on four pieces of watercolor paper. I used versafine ink and then clear embossed the images to help with any coloring that I was going to do.
• Use the coordinating dies to cut out the different layers of the image. This is optional, but since I had the dies, and love dimension, I wanted to do this.
• Use Zig Clean Color markers to color the different pieces of the image. I used green and light green for the leaves, and deep violet, violet, and lilac for the flowers.
• Die cut a panel of cardstock to use as the base for your image. I chose a medium grey color and the second largest of the infinity postal dies from Hero Arts.
• Stamp your sentiment onto this base, before you do anything else. Ahem. Also, please note that this sentiment is from an amazing Holiday stamp set from Hero Arts. I often find myself using sentiments from holiday sets, more than the images. Love that I get more use out of these!
• Adhere some fun foam to the back of that panel for extra dimension when layering onto a card base.
• Adhere the leaves, then the layers of flowers onto the base. I used tape runner adhesive for most of the leaves, and then a thin foam square on the left side, for some lift. For each of the floral die cuts I used the same thin foam squares. I usually love ALL the dimension, but for this one I wanted something less dimensional, and am so glad I had those thin foam squares in my stash. Hoarding to the rescue!
• Attach this floral piece to your card base and then embellish with whatever you prefer. I am trying to use more sequins, but I had these Nuvo dots on my desk and they just spoke to me. I love how you can get so many different sizes with them. When I first got my bottle I was just playing around with it on a piece of acetate, and now just use that to make my dots, and then glue them on to projects as needed.

This picture shows a bit of the layering and dimension that this stamp and die set can give you. What it doesn’t show, but it should, is that I colored all the flowers in with a shimmer pen. It’s like a project isn’t complete if I haven’t gone over it with that pen. And… I just bought the black, silver and gold pens. Look out!

Now, make sure to join us in this challenge. I expect we will get lots of entries and I’m excited to see them all!