Bloomin' lovely

You might want to go and make yourself a cuppa before you sit down to read this post.....you might be here a while!!! I have had so many wonderful comments about the flowers that I give away as pins, I decided to do a bit of a step by step thingy for you guys so that you can make your own. I actually used this in a class once and we stuck them on the top of these great picture frames.....they fit perfectly. So are you ready......this is what you are going to need.

PaperArtsy Hot Picks 1004 & 1008, Flora & Fauna 5. Black Stazon ink pad, TSS pointy tool and an embossing wheel, PaperArtsy Grunge Flowers dies, Big shot or Cuttlebug, Melt Pot with clear UTEE, a round cookie cutter and of course some metal tape sandwiches.

For those of you who have not yet stumbled across my tape sandwich technique, basically you will need a piece of metal cut to size with a piece of black card and Humungo sticky adhesive cut to the same size. In this instance my tape sandwich is just slightly bigger than my die

The Humungo sticky tape is beyond sticky so to help you stick all three layers together without getting in a big fine mess, I would suggest that you only remove about a centimetre of the red backing paper from the tape and stick this to the top of the matching card. Once in place, slowly remove the remaining backing sheet and smooth down. Now repeat this process to stick the metal on top of the tape. This creates your tape sandwich and the reason that we do this is to give the metal some stability.

Now just a little bit of information about PaperArtsy dies....very clever idea to have dies that match your stamps!!!! This Grungeflower however could be a bit of challenge unless you know about the notchy bit as the flower is not symmetrical. On the picture below, you can clearly see the notchy bit.....technical terminology I know, but it's language that I can understand.

Now before I explain the details of the notchy bit, I wanted to show you how to get the best out of the the die. Place the metal good side facing up and the die facing down, whizz it through your Cuttlebug or in this case Big Shot Bruce to cut out your flower.

You can see that the notchy bit is visible and there is also a raised border. In order to successfully stamp on this flower, you will need to flatten the border.

This can be don with a paper stump

Now this is an important piece of information. The petal that I am pointing to is the petal that lines up with the notchy bit on the largest flower.

In the next picture, I am pointing to the petal that lines up with the notchy bit on the second size flower. Leandra came up with the brilliant idea of marking the back of your stamp so that every time you stamp it, you can see the mark through the acrylic block and get it the right way up. You will need to use Stazon to print your images on metal and once stamped and the ink is dry, take an embossing wheel and decorate the edges.With a pointy tool, you can add detail to your image.
Then snip into the flower petals of the largest flower, making a cut approx 1.5cm between each petal.

I stamped by largest grunge flower on Gold Nugget metal and the smaller one on copper.

Now for the centre of the flowers. I stamped the smaller of the two pointy flowers from Flora & Fauna 5 on a copper tape sandwich and the little centre of the flower I managed to stamp that on a left over piece from the grunge flower.

Use the pointy tool to do the "dotty, dotty" thing in the centre of the flower.

Followed by the "scribbly, scribbly" thing on the copper flower.

Carefully cut them both out and stick together. I used a touch of Glossy Accents to do this. You also need to check that your flower fits comfortably inside your cookie cutter.

You now need to fire up your melt pot and melt some clear UTEE. You are going to need to work on a Craft Sheet, a pokey took will be helpful too.

Pour a generous puddle of UTEE over the top of you flower. It's going to bubble like crazy but DON'T PANIC!!!! Let the bubble settle down and the use the pokey tool to push down on the flower to expel and more air bubbles. Although I don't want you to rush, you do not have an endless amount of time to get your cookie cutter in place.

You also want to remove the cookie cutter whilst the UTEE is still warm but please do not test the temperature with your finger, use the pokey took to tap the UTEE to see if it has set. You can get a really nasty burn from this stuff.

Then you end up with this really fab looking embelly.

Now we can start assembling the whole thing. Use a bit of humungo sticky tape to stick the flower centre to the smaller of your grunge flowers.

Snip into the petals right up to the edge of the UTEE piece.

Bend all the petals up.

Then bend each corner back, rounding them off. Use a bit more tape to stick the whole thing together.

Then you can go on to make lots of variations to the concept of flowers. Some of these flowers were die cut and embossed instead of stamped.

Colour the high points with either stazon or alcohol inks.

This flower uses all three sizes of grunge flower instead of the UTEE centre.

Now you can go make your very own flowers and I can go and make me a cup of tea.....phew, that was a bit of an epic.

Enjoy, Lin