Simon Says Stamp Tattered Poppy Die Cut

I sat down yesterday afternoon to make a couple of cards for this week's birthday girls.  I had the new Simon Says Stamp Exclusive Tattered Poppy Die Cut that I really wanted to use so I put a transparent color wash on some watercolor card stock in hopes that I could get a sort of variegated look to my petals.  One of my favorite ways to do this is by using a reinker to put a drop (literally) of color on an acrylic block and add some water to it with my mister bottle.  In this case I also added just a tiny bit of Perfect Pearls to the color and water mix as well.  It's a lot easier to see what color the water is this way and you can add water to dilute the color wash.  I used a bit of orange on one block and a bit of melon on the other block to do the color washes.  Sometimes in this process I wet the watercolor paper before applying the color wash and other times I take it straight to the paper.  There's no rhyme or reason to it.  It just depends on the intensity of color you desire. After that, I let my water colored card stock dry naturally but you can also use a heat tool to speed up that process.  The paper has to be dry or you will not get clean cuts from your watercolor paper.  Once it was dry, I cut the poppies with my die cut.

So after I had all of my pieces cut, I sat down to assemble the poppies.  This is where I ran into a little bit of trouble.  No sooner would I get one petal adhered and move on to the next one than the first one would come undone.  So I solved this problem by taking one of my punches out of the drawer.  The one I chose just happened to be a 7/8ths inch circle, but any similar size or shape would have worked.  I then started assembling my petals on top of the circle.  This gave the pieces something to stick to that wasn't also trying to be placed in the correct position.  It's basically a foundation piece. It doesn't show, but it's important to the structure of the flower.  

It looks like this from the back side: 

It was a pretty easy fix to be able to build my flowers without the petals getting moved out of place.  I assembled 4 of these in a matter of minutes for the cards I was making using Ranger Multi Medium Matte. 

A few sequins in Rose, Watermelon and Metallic Gold give a fun & whimsical feel while a few glittered hearts lets the recipient know I'm sending love and hugs for their birthday.

I used a We R Memory Keepers Next Level Gemstone Embossing Folder for the pink paper prior to cutting it with a Scalloped & Stitched Rectangle from the WPLUS9 Sunshine Layers Die for the base panel of the card.   It is hard to capture the true 3D look of these particular embossing folders, but they are just fantastic!

I cut the "Happy" from this Mama Elephant die cut and the "Birthday" from this one.  This is by far my favorite font out there and Mama Elephant has several words available in this particular font.  I have a group of dies that I keep out all the time because they are my most used and these two are certainly in this group. I've done other cards using the "Friend" die also by Mama Elephant and I'm hoping for more words in this same font eventually.

I hope you all had a great Labor Day Weekend and have a great week.  Fall will be here at the end of this month!