Roses

I have been wondering what to put on my grandaughter's next birthday card.  She is seventeen next month.

I saw a tutorial on making paper roses on a blog recently and thought I'd give it a go. I didn't have any of the tools that were suggested - such as various punches and shaping tools -  so I improvised.

I made a paper pattern for large and small petals and a cup shape for the sepals which I then scanned in to my computer and traced in SCAL so that I could cut the petals, sepals  and leaves withmy Cricut.  I shaped the components using an ordinary embossing tool with a large ball, on a sponge stamping mat and used my normal tweezers to help shape the petals.

The tutorial used card to make the roses but I used ordinary white copy paper to make it all and coloured the leaves and sepals (they are there even if you can't see them)  with my Promarkers (Holly Green)  and the Letraset Airbrush. It worked quite well as the airbrush gave the leaves a sort of natural mottled appearance - luck not judgement. lol

I then coloured the petals with a sponge and several different ink pads to get a sort of pink and yellow shading. This is the result. I had to photograph it as of course it wouldn't fit into my scanner so it's not as clear as I would have liked but it gives an idea.

I mounted the rose and leaves on a plain white card which I had embossed and added a sentiment which I printed out on my computer.  I coloured the sentiment, first  using the airbrush and the same green Promarker (keeping it a long way away) and finishing  it by sponging lightly with the same inkpads as I used for the rose.

I like the simplicity of this card and hope Lauren will like it too. I think I'll have to make a box for it to go in though as it won't fit into an envelope.

The tutorial on making the roses is a very good one and there are some lovely cards there using different sorts of flowers  - there is a link to a video on the blog which I also watched. It was quite labour intensive to make the rose  but really enjoyable.

I found a piece of vellum that had been lying around for ages and tried making another rose using that. This is the result.

This hasn't made its way on to a card yet but  I think the vellum worked very well - saved a lot of colouring too although I don't think it's quite as realistic.  It's not quite as garish as this in real life though - it's the poor photography.  Now I'm on the search for suitable pieces of paper to make more......................... watch this space.

Hope you like my efforts.