The Flower Challenge - Use Vellum or Acetate

Okay, who made it May already? On the positive side here in the UK we get not one, but two bank holidays this month and one of them is on Monday. Yippee! Double yippee, it's also time for our next challenge over at The Flower Challenge and this time we want to see acetate or vellum on your creations.

I used the PaperArtsy JOFY 62 stamp set that I bought when I did two fantastic workshops with Jo Firth-Young a couple of weeks ago. I used the same technique to colour the stamps that she taught at the workshop too, making colour puddles of purple and blue chalk paint and stamping onto them in black archival. I coloured in some of the bits on the stamps with black and white pens before cutting out the flowers. 

I took a strip of acetate that had been the backing for a Claritystamp stamp (as all my other acetate had gone walkabout) and dropped on blue and purple alcohol inks along with Ranger Silver mixative. I then used my finger or tilted the acetate to move the ink to create a pattern I was happy with and then let it dry (I discovered that my acetate wasn't heat proof when I tried to speed up the drying process!).

I trimmed out a piece of a 7x5 card base and then cut the acetate to fill the gap. I used red liner tape to secure the acetate and to glue a strip of the card base back into place. I used a black permanent marker to draw in a border to replicate the pattern on some of the flowers and continued it across the acetate section. 

I stamped the sentiment from a Clearly Besotted stamp set that was lurking in the table in black ink using my MISTI (as I hadn't thought to stamp it before I stuck the acetate on!). I shaped the flowers slightly with my fingers and added them to the card with a little red liner tape behind their centres. To finish, I added some sparkly bits to the centre of the flowers. Trust me, it looks better in real life, than my dodgy photo!

My lovely teamies and our fantastic guest designer have lots of inspiration for you, so maybe if it rains on Monday, you might want to craft an entry, and we'll be back with more inspiration in the middle of the month. 

I hope you all have a fantastic weekend. I'm hoping to get a little crafting done once I've had a good lie in tomorrow. It was my first week back at work this week and whilst I'm feeling much much better my breathing still isn't back to normal, so a good rest is on the cards. Love to you all x