My Bloomin' Bits and Pieces!

The Dream Team is all abloom for the month of March, and who could blame us? Haven't we all seen enough gray, dreary, rainy/snowy days of winter? It's impossible to be depressed when flowers are in abundance, even if it's just a hint sprouting through the snow.

My card today screams warm and tropical sunny days, and was created with leftover bits and pieces from my trip to the UK for the Stitches craft show in Birmingham, England.

Lynell and I were demonstrating stencil techniques, and teaching mini classes in the huge Woodware booth, which also provided the opportunity to play a bit with new or forgotten techniques. Judith had handed us a box of Sakura Cray-Pas...an oily/waxy form of pastels to experiment with. Kind of like crayons for grown-ups. We were creating backgrounds on cardstock by blending various colors of the pastels. Lynell tried to paste-emboss on top of one of these backgrounds, but when she tried to use the Molten Magic technique on it, heating the pasted item just made it want to peel off. In the process, it left a "ghost" image of the design, which was very cool, but kind of a waste of the pasting effort. I played around until I could mimic the ghosting by using a cotton swab with rubbing alcohol to remove color through the Dragonfly stencil design. The result looks very much like batik. To add more interest, I paste-embossed the Daisy Background in Translucent paste over the surface which was very subtle, but you can see in the above pictures how cool it looks.

The Daisy background was also stenciled using the same Cray-Pas over the machine-embossed panel of the Daisies. I rubbed a few colors of the pastel on my Ranger craft mat, and using the Dreamweaver stencil brushes in a rouging manner, applied the color over the surface of the raised design. With the addition of a couple of Prima flowers and a fun new canvas-covered button, my blooming card was complete.

This is the perfect example of why you should always save the bits and pieces that are great on their own, but didn't work for some other project that you were working on. You never know when those pieces will become the jumping off point for a whole new spurt of creativity!

Be sure to visit the rest of the team's blogs for more inspiration, and play along with the team for this month's challenge. Just link your own "bloomin'" creation(s) to the link on the Dream It Up! blog, or email pics of your creations to lynell@dreamweaverstencils.com, for an opportunity to be this month's randomly selected prize winner.

Dream it UP  

Laura Drahozal  

Louise Healy  

Terrece Siddoway 

Georgia Sommers 

Lee Kellogg 

Liz Martin

 Cyndi Bundy 

Cherylynn Moser

Kristi Van Doren

Pam Hornschu (me)

Wendy Jordan