Not a Tree

I can't exactly say most times where I get the idea for a card from, probably something in my subconscious, but for once I do know what inspired this card!

While I was cutting out the stamps from my Arboretum Themplate from Elusive Images I was struck by the fact that the canopy of one of the trees was exactly the right sort of shape to fill a pot full of flowers! In my garden, despite the dreadful wet and horrible summer, I have some lovely tubs of Impatiens (Busy Lizzies) in flower. I had been admiring how pretty they looked that very day. Have you ever noticed how the petals of these flowers are almost irridescent? I had also seen some beautiful things made by Glenda Waterworth which involved using shimmery embossing powders to add flowers to the trees from the Arboretum themeplate and it occured to me that the tree stamp and Glenda's embossing technique would let me create my own version of the tubs of flowers in my garden - ideal for a birthday card I needed to make.

First of all I stamped the tree by inking it with green inks, then used shades of magenta and pink chalk inks to stamp the flowers. Next I went over each flower with a Versamark pen so as it would be sticky and then sprinkled on some Cosmic Shimmer "Iced Blush Luster" Embossing powder and heat set it. It'a very pale translucent powder so the colours of the ink show through. Next I cut out a plant pot shaped template, wrapped some ribbon round it, added a tag with the greeting on it and attached it just under the tree branches, hiding the trunk part. This was matted onto some of the same green card I had used to cut my pot template from and I had my "pot of Impatiens" ready to afix to a card.

I made the card from some of the same green card and made a backing paper by starting with some pale pink paper to which I added some depth by applying some Cerise and Magenta colour if ink with a sponge. I used a pouncing movement to dab the ink on, rather than sweeping the sponge around on the paper. Next I took the little flower stamps I had used on the main image and stamped them randomly over the paper, and finally spritzed the whole thing with some pink Glimmer Mist to give it some shimmer. This was applied to the card and the pot of flowers was then adhered with foam pads.

I guess it's not a very elaborate card to look at in some ways, but I do think it looks very like the real flowers in my garden! In case you are wondering which tree from that themeplate I used, it's one of the smaller ones - the one that sits upside down in the top right quadrant of the plate. I would have added a photo of the real tub of flowers to this post, but once again it's a horrible wet day here, not good for taking photos! Perhaps I can add a picture before they all fade for the winter if the sun ever decided to show it's face again.