A Gorgeous Big Bloom

Happy Saturday!
I totally meant to get this post up much earlier in the day today...but Matthew and I have been working under the house to get our furnace fixed...what a pain!  I don't do well in small spaces...and being surrounded by spiders - eek!  But we got things taken care of and our repairs seem to have fixed everything with the heating, which is fabulous!  It works better than it ever has in the 8 years we've owned this house - Woohoo!!

So onto my very late post for today :)
I purchased the beautiful Big Bloom stamp set from Simon Says Stamp during their Stamptember event this year, but had not had the chance to do anything with it.  So I forced myself to pull it out this week and let my brain wander with ideas for it.

I was inspired by the sketch at Mojo Monday this week and set to work on my card.

You have no idea how much fun this card was to make!  That flower!  Wow!  I decided to keep the image as one piece and not do any layers besides the center.  So I pulled out my new Inktense pencils and started to color in the image, adding water to smooth everything out and intensify those colors.

In the shadow areas I layered up lots of color to get some really dark depth and kept the centers of each petal nice and light.  This image took me awhile to color.  I was really afraid of messing it up, so I took my time and got everything colored the way I wanted it.

While that dried, I added a little embossing paste over a heart stencil and then let some Hickory Smoke distress ink run over top of that (just got that distress color...wow!  Love it!!).  It created really cool water streaks and highlighted those hearts.  Let me share the sketch I followed so I can describe what I used for each shape.

 

I used the large flower in the circle space, figured that fit well.  Then the little square behind that circle is what I intended the embossed hearts to represent.  I felt those worked better for me than trying to find paper that I enjoyed or felt worked with my image.  

For the stripe running behind the circle, I die cut a little scallop border, and then added a little pink striped piece of paper on top of that to tie it all together.  I embossed my sentiment onto some vellum and added it behind the center of the flower.  It's on a little bit of an angle because I didn't want it to fully cover that sweet pink border I added :)

To finish the card, I did another thin stripe of that pink paper along the side and scattered some Sparkling Clear sequins from Pretty Pink Posh around the card.

So much fun!  I adore this gorgeous card, and I'm so happy with how it all turned out!!

I'd like to enter this card into the following challenges:

    A Gem of a Challenge #160-Female Birthday

    Crafty Catz #306-Flowers

    Creative Inspirations #342-Florals

    Mojo Monday #429
    Share Joy Challenge #17 

    Simon Says Stamp-Something New

    The Crazy Challenge #213-Celebrations

    Time Out #47-Birthdays

Thanks so much for visiting! <3