Bloom Away

My parents arrived from Australia a week or so ago, with this stamp set.  It is an SU set but I don’t imagine it will ever appear in my Canadian catalog because it features Australian native flowers.  I was browsing some blogs one day and saw a card which featured a gum blossom, so followed up the card information to find the set in the Australian catalog.  My dad  located a demonstrator not far from their place and… now I have a new set.

The set includes a waratah, a gum blossom and a banksia, these are a couple of my first attempts with the gum and banksia.  I know the gum blossom will be my favourite stamp from the set.  I have like gum blossoms ever since my  mum read Snugglepot and Cuddlepie to me when I was five or six.  I even won a prize in Grade 1, when I dressed up as Ragged Blossom for a Book Week parade!

I stamped the full image twice for both cards, once in green, once in black.  I coloured the black images using  watercolour pencils, ink from the stamp pad lids and a blender pen.  I then punched out a feature square from the coloured image, matted it and attached it to the green image with stampin’ dimensionals.  In the gum blossom card above I masked the edge of the background image using a post-it note and then stamped the left of the stamp again to create a larger bunch of blossom.

Thank you for dropping in today and a special thanks for the encouraging comments people have been leaving for me.  I have really enjoyed your kind words.

Supplies:

Stamps: Bloom Away, Fundamental Phrases
Inks: Basic Black, Always Artichoke, Old Olive, Pixie Pink
Cardstock: Always Artichoke, Old Olive, Whisper White
Also:  Faber-Castell watercolour pencils, square punches