Garden Grandeur two ways and DIY mini slimline

Hi guys! 

It's Erica back on the LRDS blog today with a couple of floral cards, using the Garden Grandeur Slimline set. All three pieces: the Garden Grandeur Slimline stamp set, the coordinating diecut and the coordinating layering stencils. 

I have also made a YouTube video for these cards, if you prefer to watch instead of reading, and you can find that VIDEO HERE.

As a summer loving gal, I'm all about the florals and sunshine. Even with it being October. Luckily for me I live in a sunny and warm place, and lots of flowers are still blooming here. 

With these fun layering stencils I had an idea of doing a cascading rainbow for one, and more natural looking colours on the other one. Purely for research purposes of course, lol. 

Before I did anything else though, I swatched the inks I have. I like my swatches as it's not always easy to tell what the inks will look like on paper, from what they look like as an ink pad. Another little quirk I have is that I like to keep brands together, so I used one of the pieces from the Diagonal Stitched Postage Frames Slimline dies to cut out the swatch pieces. On these I then dragged the ink pads to get lots of colour on it, marked it with a label and then punched a hole in it. 

So my first card is done with the more natural colours, and I went for Soft Kisses for the bigger flowers, Dan-D-Lion for the smaller and Olive Branch for both layers for the layers. I have only used the layering stencils for these, not the outline stamp. 

For the rainbow one, I used, from top to bottom: Dan-D-Lion, Soft Kisses, La La Lavender, Marina Madness and Tropical Sea. I aimed to do the same colours in the same spots on all the different layers, but it wasn't 100% spot on. Still turned out lovely though! 

As I wanted to go more mini slimline for these cards, rather than full-size slimline I did some creative diecutting using the Diagonal Stitched Postage Frames Slimline dies as I wanted some pattern around the edges. 

On the back of the flowers, once I had used the coordinating diecut on them, I covered them with foam tape to prop them up and create dimension. Dimension and layers are life, if you ask me. 

The last thing needed was sentiments, and I have used the same one from the Garden Grandeur stamp set, stamped up with Raven ink on white card stock. Both of these are trimmed down in different ways, and then adhered to the cards. 

Ok, so I might have said the last thing was sentiments, but I did go a bit big on the bling on the rainbow flowers but hey, I had the perfect gems to do it so I had to. HAD to. I couldn't not do it. 

The pink flowers were kept bling free to show that I can go clean and simple too. Occasionally. Mostly with my Inner Crafty Drama Queen kicking and screaming, but still.

I did make a video for these cards too. You can find that over on my YouTube channel, if you want to see more of the process, but if not, thanks for stopping by today. I hope you enjoyed these cards and the summer vibes coming through your screen. 

Until next time, lots of love and happy crafting from Erica