Sunflower time

Thank you for your kind comments about my Get Well card (previous post). I did warn you I would be back today, so here is a very different card that I made very quickly when we were invited to a 60th birthday party a week or two ago.

Last month my husband had to travel to the south of UK for a family funeral, and flights were difficult at short notice so he had to fly to Bournemouth and travel by train across to Bognor Regis. My sister lives in Bournemouth so she kindly let him use her spare room, fed him and ferried him around to airports and stations. When he came home he handed me a package from Jean, and inside was these beautiful serviettes. She knows how much I like sunflowers, so she knew these would appeal to me. I looked at them and said "Hmm. I must find something nice to do with those", and my dear hubby said, "Won´t you just use them as serviettes?" Of course I won´t!!

So, for my card I took one serviette and separated it into its three layers. Taking the printed layer I cut it just passed the centre, and used modge podge to glue it to a piece of white card, and glaze it. This makes it wrinkle a little but I  rather like the texture. I left it over night to dry.

The next day I cut one flower away, and using only about two thirds of the petals, I fussy cut it and set it aside. 

With the rest of it I cut out a 6 inch square as accurately as I could, keeping the flower fairly central. I used a new We-R-Memorykeepers, mini 8 punch called vine. This is a large corner punch which, used eight times, will make the mat you can see here. With the matching border die it can be extended up to a large mat that just fits onto a 12" x 12" scrapbook page. I saw it in use once and liked it, and I got my son to bring one over for me, but somehow I hadn´t got around to trying it. I do like the shape it makes.

I found some yellow card that matched the sunflower and made a square 15cm base card, and mounted my mat so it just fitted on it. Then I added the second ´thinner´flower shaping the petals slightly.

For the centre I found some micro beads that at some time I had coloured yellow with alcohol ink, and used cosmic shimmer acrylic glue to stick them in a ring. Then I filled the centre of it with rust coloured accent beads. The outer ring is made up of tiny gold beads, amber glass beads and burgundy faceted glass beads. As the party was for a Spanish friend, I used a gold peel-off sentiment that says ¨Felicidades´, literally ´Happiness´, which is the usual greeting on a card here whatever the celebration.