Stamp Review Crew: Beautiful Bouquet

Well, it is a new Stampin' Up! year, kind of. The 2018-19 Annual Catalog just went live, and everyone is abuzz with the goodies we all want. Right. Now. But you know what? I bet all of us have stamp sets in our stash that we could not wait to get, but once we got them, we didn't do anything with them! Beautiful Bouquet is the set we are featuring this time, and it is such an awesome set!

What is the Stamp Review Crew, you ask? We are an international group of Stampin' Up! demonstrators that gets together to do a blog hop on the first and third (and sometimes on a fifth) Monday of each month. For each hop we chose a single stamp set for us all to use, and then we let our creativity loose! We have a blog with all of the hops archived, so you can hop through any of the hops any time. Click here to go to the blog to see all of the hops! To go to the specific post for this hop, click here, or on the banner above.

If you are following along in order, then you have just arrived from the delightful Dawn Tidd's blog.

My hubby and I just had our 28th wedding anniversary! And this stamp set is pretty perfect for all things wedding and anniversary.

There are so many fantastic and touching sentiments in this set, you might find yourself sending cards for occasions you don't usually send them for! I know I try to remember the anniversaries in my family, but I don't often send cards.

For the background, I did a wash of Pineapple Punch, Grapefruit Grove, and Poppy Parade. Drying and layering more color on a couple of times. That is what gives it the depth and variation that I love.

Then I stamped and die cut a bunch of flowers in the same colors, and the addition of Mango Melody. And leaves die cut from Granny Apple Green and Call Me Clover.

The sentiment is Copper Heat embossed on a strip of Thick Whisper White and adhered to the watercolor panel. Of course, I stitched around the watercolor panel.

Then all of the flowers and leaves were adhered with liquid glue or  mini dimensionals.

Yes, there was a lot of fiddling and moving of flowers involved and this took much longer than it should have. 😏

The inside is finished off with more stamping, and I did do a bit of masking here also.

For this card I started out using the Wreath Builder jig and the twig image. I was going to do an entire twig wreath, but when I got halfway around, I was inspired to do it half twig half floral! It seemed very masculine and feminine, and very wedding appropriate!

Now, I will confess that I almost did a watercolor wash night sky in purples and blues. But I thought I should try something else as I had just done a wash.

(you all have no idea how hard I have to try to not do watercolor washes constantly. for reals)

So I went straight to my other favorite, woodgrain everything! 😁

And copper embossing on vellum.

The flower image was stamped in progressively lighter shades of purple. Starting with Blackberry Bliss, then Fresh Fig, Rich Razzleberry, and finally Berry Burst.

Add some single leaves in Shaded Spruce.

Diecut some flower clusters in Berry Burst and Fresh Fig. Use the leftover Call Me Clover leaves from the previous card. They coordinate well with the Shaded Spruce, lucky for me! 😎

The Stamparatus helped with the shading on the flowers on the inside. I stamped the whole flower images first with Berry Burst, then add Blackberry Bliss on the bottom portion of the image, dabbing some of the ink off where it should fade into the Berry Burst.

The twigs were stamped in Crumb Cake.

That's it for me! Next up is the fabulous Kelly Kent!