Hello crafty co-horts! I’ve got a card up on Pinkfresh Studio’s blog today that uses a number of Pinkfresh products. As soon as I saw the Reset stamp set I knew I wanted to use those little flower stamps. I love the simple, sketchy style of the drawings and I thought they’d look so cool if stamped with fade out ink then drawn over with colored pencils. So that’s what I did.

I stamped all of the flower images at least twice on some Neenah white 110 lb., which is not the best paper for pencil drawing, you can get deeper more saturated coloring using paper that has a little texture to it. Or even just some colored pencil paper. My coloring was very simply done and I thought they were still really pretty and was happy to use them on this card.

They were all stamped with Fade Out ink by Ink on 3, colored in with my pencils and die cut with the accompanying Reset die set. I used a blender brush to apply some of Pinkfresh’s Sky Blue and Summer Shower inks onto more Neenah white cardstock and die cut it out, along with some Tonic gold pearl specialty paper using my Fancy Oval Frame die. And set that all aside.

I had always planned on using Pinkfresh’s new Curvy Leaves dies, but I thought I could keep it subtle that they’d stay in the background, those penciled in flowers were intended to be the focal point. But the more I cut out leaves and colored them with Pinkfresh’s soft, pretty, pastel colors…. well I ended up with a lot! I started adhering them down to the outside edge of my card base, and used my scissors to cut anything that went off the edge. I put down a popped-up border and applied some MORE curvy leaves in gold embossed vellum on top of that. I was definitely in danger of losing control of this card.

I stamped that lovely “Hoping” sentiment, from the Choose Hope stamp set, into the middle of the blue center of the Fancy Oval die cut. Used foam tape to apply the blue and gold fancy frame into the center of the card base and decided to reduce the number of pencil colored flowers from what I had originally intended to use, to keep the card from being too crazy busy. I ended up using those little gold dots that popped out when I die cut the Fancy Oval frame, and put some of them in the center of the flowers.

Before you go, I wanted to share a link to the inspiration for this card design that I saw on Pinterest. It looks to be a watercolor by an artist by the name of Victoria Nelson.

I hope that some of my design choices have inspired you to make something new today. Thanks so much for coming by!

-Anne