Butterfly Challenge #33 : F is for Flowers, or P is for Poppies

Yes, the Butterfly Challenge for this time includes the criteria to add some flowers, so it was the perfect opportunity to try out my new Heartfelt Creations poppy stamp and die set. This set was only released last week, but I had pre-ordered it - I´m a sucker for anything poppy related - so mine came very quickly.

Like many of the HC flowers these stamps and dies each come as one plate, so if you stamp the whole plate, you can cut it all out in one go. To make all of these poppies I cut the entire plate twice. I stamped one in black ink and one in Memento rhubarb stalk ink, but because I chose to paint them, this doesn´t really show.

I had intended to use copic markers, my usual choice for colouring, but I remembered that once upon a time I liked H2O paints for poppies because they give the petals a lovely sheen which most poppies have naturally. It is literally years since I used them, but I dug out my paints and had a lovely messy time. I found that the die is not a perfect match for the stamps so I over-painted the edges quite generously as, for this project, I did not want any white frames around the petals.

There were no leaves with the poppy set so I used the leaves from a similar HC set called delightful daisies. These were also painted with two shades of H2Os and die cut.

While the paints were wet, I also did a quick wash of one shade on the underside of the cut flowers in case it showed, and covered both sides of a scrap of white paper ready for my butterfly.

I used some off-cuts of gold mirri-card and two dies from Spellbinders Respendent Rectangles set for the frame, Britannia dies for the greeting, and the Memory Box die Delaney Butterfly, for the lace butterfly. From my scrap of painted paper I cut the matching Memory Box die Cheviot Butterfly, and glued the gold lace one over it. 

I used an A4 embossing folder (sorry, make unknown), to give some definition to the backing paper, and then mounted it all up.

I am pleased with the end result. i love the sheen on the flowers and leaves.

So now I will link this up for the Butterfly Challenge #33, and thanks to Di´s posting, I now know there is a new challenge on the Memory Box blog and their first challenge is to use a Memory Box die and a Butterfly, and I have just a few hours left to enter.

I used up a few snippets of white and gold card card for this, so I can also go and play in Pixie´s Snippets Playground.