A Glorious Bouquet...

Hi folks...Can I let you into a little secret. When I received the bundle of new releases from Stampers Anonymous, I absolutely loved the Glorious Bouquet stamp set BUT I was a little apprehensive because there are great watercolour artists out there and I am not one of them so I chickened out from making any samples for Creativation.

but I decided to bite the bullet at the weekend, confront my insecurities and have a go. If it turned out a bit of a dog's dinner, no-one would ever know. It just goes to prove that you don't know what you can do unless you try and believe me no-one was more surprised than me that it turned out way better than I expected which I think had more to do with how easy the stamp was to colour,although it did take a bit of time, than any skill on my part.

The large floral image comes with it's own acrylic block but this scaredy cat decided to use the Stamp Platform to make sure I got every little bit of the amazing detail. I inked the stamp with Black Soot Archival and watercoloured using Distress Markers and a Ranger Detailer Brush.

Once the image was dry, I used the Detailer Brush to create a light wash of Antique Linen Distress Oxide ink around the image fading it out towards the edge of the card. I took care around the detailed leaf areas at the edges of the image so as not to reactivate the Distress Marker colouring, the last thing I needed was ink bleeding into the background area.

I then stamped one of the border images from Ornate Trims randomly on the background using Antique Linen Distress Oxide ink. There are so many gorgeous trim borders in this stamp set and I suspect I will be using it frequently.

I trimmed a mat of white cardstock to be slightly larger than the Glorious Bouquet panel, coloured it with Walnut Stain Distress Oxide using a blending tool and stamped around the edges with the script stamp from Entomology using Ground Espresso Distress Archival.

 and spritzed it with water...

I decided to stamp another border image from Ornate Trims inked with Ground Espresso Distress Archival randomly around the edges of the panel and splattered with Walnut Stain Distress Oxide ink.

 I stamped one of sentiments from Glorious Bouquet

and coloured a scrap of card with Walnut Stain Distress Oxide ink, dusted it with my powder tool and stamped another sentiment (there are so many to choose from in this set) with Versamark ink, sprinkled with Super Fine Detail White Embossing Powder, heat set, matted on to white card, cut out and added a twine bow.

And why do I love Tim Holtz/Stampers Anonymous stamp sets so much...SIMPLES. You can mix and match images and sentiments from different stamp sets and they always seem to go together beautifully.
It's hard to believe it's the last day of January already and tomorrow will be a new month. New Month...New Me perhaps because I've actually nailed one of my New Year Resolutions...that's a first for sure but I will tell you all about it tomorrow.

Hugs Kath

xxx