Creation Station Blog Hop – Garden Party

We’re having an Easter Garden Party here at the Creation Station this month and we invite you to join us. You’ve reached the blog of Mikaela Titheridge, at The Crafty oINK Pen, which is based in Cambridgeshire, UK.

Gardens bring us each something different – a space to socialise, to grow fruit and vegetables to put on the table or a canvas for growing pretty flowers. Well, I’m no gardener, although I’d love to be able to create a beautiful blooming space, with interest all year round. Well, I may not be able to grow flowers, but I can sure create them easily enough with paper and ink.

I recently created a contemporary wreath hoop using various punches and dies for my Spring Retreat and decided to create a coordinating card for it.

The Beautiful Bouquet set is a gorgeous Stamp Set and Framelits bundle that I’ve not used anywhere near enough of. In fact my Petal Pair Textured Impressions Embossing Folders actually haven’t been used at all. What a gorgeous impression they give. I had set out to emboss the entire front, but after embossing the first half, I couldn’t bring myself to fill in the other side.I liked the contrast.

I thought it would be fun to recreate the embroidery hoop to the front of the card, so used the Layering Circle Framelits to create it. I guess you could add pretty much any sentiment to this card and for some reason Congratulations seemed only right and fitting.

This was the Embroidery Hoop Wreath that I created for my Retreat. You could create any flower combination in many colour choices and get a different look every time. Now admittedly I used a retired die to create the largest flower, but I gave the ladies all the template to be able to recreate this again at home. You can upscale and downsize flower petals to create the flower of your choice by photocopying them.

Garden Party Paper Flowers

Once I die cut or punched the flowers out, I spritzed them with Stampin’ Mist and crumpled them in my hand. OK, now you could just mist with water, but I do like the smell of Stampin’ Mist and it was at hand after all. Scrunching it helps to break down the fibres, making it more flexible and life like.

The pearl centres to the smallest cream flowers, were coloured grey to tie in with the largest flower, using the Stampin’ Blends pens. These are our fabulous alcohol based pens.

I love the colours of the two tone flower, where I used Perfect Plum and Rich Razzleberry. Two colours I seldom use, but teamed together make the most gorgeous combination for a flower. I added a hint of Always Artichoke to the tips of the centre of this flower which was created using the Pansy Punch. The colour of the largest flower is interesting. It’s actually Sahara Sand, but it’s funny how it has a slight green tint to it. I used the same colour on the card and daubered a tiny hint of basic grey to the centre.

The Daisy Punch was used for the final flower, where several layers of petals were really crumpled up. A hot glue gun helped to keep everything in place. The sentiment? Well that came from the Petal Palette, Memories & More pack. There are a few die cut words in there.

Well I hope you enjoyed what I have shared and I do hope, like with every good party, you’ll mingle around the garden party some more to see what the others in the team have created. The list of all present at this party are listed below.

Wishing you a very Happy Easter