flowers and a wreath...

Hey there!  Hope you have been having a great week!  Our nice weather has returned and I'm hoping that it holds out through the weekend as I have plans to meet up with a bloggy friend on Sunday!   In the meantime I have a couple of cards to share.  The first one is for Color Throwdown and Less is More.  Less is More has a wonderful sketch challenge going on right now and I love a good sketch so I had to play along.  I used the colors from Color Throwdown and watercolored the flowers and leaves from the Concord & 9th Wonderful Florals stamp set with ZIG markers.  Once they were mostly dry I die cut them with the matching dies.  I arranged everything on some woodgrain cardstock that I die cut with an A Jillian Vance Design Stitched Dot rectangle die.  The sentiment is from the Concord & 9th Posie Fill In stamp set and was stamped on kraft cardstock with VersaFine Vintage Sepia ink.  The flowers and leaves were stamped with VersaFine CLAIR ink in Tulip Red and Green Oasis.  I absolutely LOVE the CLAIR inks.  They stamp beautifully and are so versatile!  Finished up with some enamel dots in coral and green.

The second card is a bonus card of sorts.  April was customer appreciation month at Concord & 9th and on IG they are having a giveaway.  Simply make a card using something from the April release and post it on IG for a chance to win.  At first I thought I wouldn't be able to enter and then I remembered that I had purchased the Wreath Turnabout stamp set and that was released in April!  I have long wanted to purchase a turnabout stamp set, but haven't been able to because I don't have the original MISTI.   I purchased the Wreath Turnabout because I thought it might work with the mini MISTI and while it sort of works you don't get the best results.  So I decided to try making a wreath without the MISTI and it worked!  It took some trial and error, but I managed to get a pretty nice wreath.  At this point I'm not going to explain what I did as I want to try this technique with the other wreath in the set and see how goes.  But I will say that it wasn't as hard as you might think it would be!  To keep things from getting to complicated as I worked out how to create the wreath I used only two colors.  I die cut the finished piece with the largest AJVD Stitched Dot rectangle and then added some sequins before adhering it to a olive green card base.

Hope you have a wonderful day!

Supplies:  Cardstock:  kraft, watercolor, woodgrain, olive; Stamps:  Concord & 9th; Dies: Concord & 9th, A Jillian Vance Design; Sequins:  Ellen Hutson; Inks:  VersaFine CLAIR, Stampin Up!; Watercolor Medium:  ZIG Clean Color Real Brush markers