Hi everyone, and welcome back! I got the chance to play around with a new Simon Says Stamp release: Peony Background, and made a bright and modern square card with it!

Simon’s Peony Background stamp is a red rubber, large, detailed, gorgeous background stamp that can be used to make cards in many ways. Simon Says Stamp will have many examples to show you, plus the rest of the new Dear Friend release, here.

I started my project by grabbing some of my Pinkfresh Studio inks: Fairy Dust ink cube and Rise and Shine collections. I used a blending brush to apply large circles of color onto white cardstock, where I thought the center of the blooms would land when I stamped—concentrating the darker colors where the center of the flower would be and fading the ink blending out. One of the large blooms was yellow, and I threw some orange (Apricot) in there as I was blending. And I think it’s possible I got some cross-contamination on one of my pink blending brushes; it looked a bit purple to me, so I also threw in a little Soft Lilac to emphasize it. Let your inner artist make the decisions when you find yourself in the zone!

When I was done blending my colors, I put it in my stamping platform and used the Peony Background stamp with Wow!’s Gold Pearl embossing powder. I misjudged the placement when coloring with the smaller buds/blooms, but my card ended up being bright and dreamy, and I think it’s lovely!

With a stamp like this, you always loathe to cut any of it off, so I just trimmed a bit off the edges and ended up with my topping panel being 4 1/2 inches tall and 5 inches wide. I popped it up on a 5 X 5 in. lilac cardbase to match that little bit of purple I saw in the blending. And, of course, I rounded the corners with my Crop-A-Dile Corner Chomper before I did that. I also threaded a black twine string around it and tied a big, sloppy bow (my colorful card needed a bit of contrast) to tuck the sentiment in, from Simon’s Floral Garden stamp set, with it.

I added some of Pinkfresh’s gold glitter drops and was done!

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

-Anne