Hydrangea ~ Design Team Member, Karen

Hello everyone!  It's Karen posting for you today, and I'm sharing a card that started out as a wreath... but ended up being a hydrangea ( ??? ).  Scroll down for the details...

 I started out by stamping multiples of all three sizes of the outlined flower images from A6 Moderne Flowers, and a bunch of the outlined leaves from the A6 Leaves set on a large piece of watercolour paper.  My intention was to paint them all in autumn shades, fussy cut them out, and put them together to make a wreath.  But there was something about seeing 25 or so of the flower images side by side that made me think "hydrangea".  So my plan did a complete about take, I found a blue that I painted them all with, and got busy cutting.

 I gradually watered down the shade of blue that I was using, making some of the blossoms lighter, and lighter still, as I knew I wanted some to be hidden behind that would be darker, or in 'shadow'.  I used a bright yellow mixed with a bit of green to make up my limey/green leaves, varying the colour a bit on each one.  At first glance it looks like an awful lot of cutting!  But once I got going, it probably only took about 45 minutes - easy to do while you watch a little TV.  I added a dot of silvery Perfect Pearls to the center of each flower, and let them dry.
I ran a couple of rows of irregular stitching around my white cardstock piece, and then started building my flower from the bottom up.  I used a bit of adhesive just on the center of each flower back, so that the petals all curve up a little, giving a lovely bit of added dimension shown below:

By far the scariest part of putting this card together was adding those little blue spatters to the background - after all the work of stamping/painting/cutting/assembling, I was panicked that I might drop a big blob of paint onto my work!  So it was definitely a less is more situation, and I stopped after getting just enough spatters to cover it.  I white embossed my sentiment onto black cardstock and adhered it with a few pop dots, and called it a day.  Happy stamping!