Six Flower Cards with AB {by Liesbeth Fidder-de Vos}

Hello everyone, Liesbeth here with you today for showing you the beauty of two PaperArtsy stamp sets by Alison Bomber. I'd also love to show you some fun ways to use Infusions

This time I chose this two beauties: The Apple Blossom, PaperArtsy EAB46 and the Coneflowers, PaperArtsy EAB49. Although they're not exactly the same style, I think they work together perfectly. Just look at all those beautiful flowers! 

I will also work with three summer colours of PaperArtsy Infusions Dye Stain: Are You Cerise, Slime and Sunset Beach

I decided to make a few pretty cards. After all, who wouldn't enjoy receiving a beautiful card filled with flowers? This is how I made them:

On a piece of smooth watercolor paper, I sprinkled just a little of three Infusions colors along the left side. After spritzing it with water, I let the colors blend together into a vibrant burst of color. While everything was still wet, I inked up the text stamp (EAB46) directly from the background and stamped it onto the right side. So instead of using an ink pad, you're actually using the card itself as your ink source

After letting the card dry well I stamped some fragments of the text and some flowers from Stamp set PaperArtsy EAB49 with Tsukineko StazOn - Jet Black. This ink stays deep black even if you use bleach, which I use a lot

And yesss , here comes the bleach. Infusions work really well with bleach; every color of Infusions bleaches differently, it is always a surprise. I  started to ,paint' the petals with a synthetic brush and watered down bleach. If it doesn't bleach enough, I use pure bleach, but first I give it a bit of time.

At the left side you can see I also stamped with bleach. Put a drop of bleach onto a craft sheet or big acrylic block, spread it out to a very thin layer and use it as an inkpad.... bleachpad ;-)

After the bleach was dry, this card was a bit to white, it needed a bit of colour so I painted the flowers lightly with watered down Infusions.

Being a firm believer in the 'more is more' philosophy, I couldn't stop there! I stamped a few more leaves around the edges in light green ink (Versafine Clair-Avocado) and finished the card with a beautiful sentiment in black.

It's not really a technique, but I just had to show you this. It's one of the other cards I made. When working with Infusions, little surprises often appear on your paper. In this case, a beautiful 'flower' suddenly emerged all by itself. It wasn't planned at all—it just happened naturally. I love moments like that!

A detail of the ,flower' on the finished card, love it!

Before showing you my six cards, I would love to tell something about other finishing touches I did

 

This beautiful Apple blossom stamp from EAB46 is the focal point on one of the cards and it needed to pop out a bit more, so I drew a shadow around it with charcoal pencil and smudged it out with my finger

In my opinion this card needed very strong. bright coloured flowers. I coloured them with a pink Ecoline marker.

Here I coloured the leaves at the right side after drying (stamp-in-Infusions-technique) with only water; the water automatically absorbs and spreads colour from the infusions.

Two pictures to show you the bleaching effects again. The light text in the background are stamped with bleach. It`s important to clean your stamp immediately after stamping with bleach

And...after mixing up both PaperArtsy stamp sets EAB46 and EAB49 and having lots of fun making the Infusions backgrounds I ended up with these six cards

The Summer card is the one I showed you step-by-step above

I extended the stem by drawing with a black fineliner

Springtime and Postcard.

I secretly used an extra stamp here (PaperArtsy EAB21)...because the text matches so perfectly. The small birds nest stamp is stamped with a dark red ink and masked before I stamped the flower

The shadowed apple blossom and the Imagine card with the strange Infusions flower :-)

It was such a joy to create with these wonderful PaperArtsy products once again. I absolutely love the endless possibilities of Infusions, and combined with the beautiful floral stamps designed by Alison Bomber, they made creating this blog post a real pleasure.

I hope I've been able to inspire you and perhaps given you some ideas to try for yourself. Have lots of fun creating, and I'll see you again next time. Thank you so much for stopping by and taking a look!

Liesbeth XX

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Altered Floral Notebooks with EAB {by Autumn Clark}

Hi friends!  It's Autumn Clark from SewPaperPaint with you today and with Valentine's Day right around the corner, I thought I would be fun to create some handmade gifts for my loved ones.  What's better than a bouquet of flowers for Valentines?!  So I've created a couple of handmade journals, bursting with bouquets and filled with love...  

I created the notebooks in two colorways to inspire you all year as you craft your own handmade gifts.  First I'm showing the products used for the pink journal, including the focal florals from PaperArtsy stamp set EAB48 by Alison Bomber and the supporting berry stamp set EABF.  I also used two bottles of Infusions, Sunset Beach and Magenta and a coordinating ink pad.  

 

Next we have the products used for the blue-green journal, including the same florals, but different focal stamp from PaperArtsy stamp set EAB48 by Alison Bomber and the supporting dandelion stamp set EAB52.  Again, I used two bottles of Infusions, A Bit Jaded and Olive Tree and a couple of coordinating ink pads.

I purchased a stash of these unlined journals from Amazon HERE to create personalized gifts.  I measured the cover to include a bit of the black cover as a border and cut watercolor panels for each journal.  I knew I wanted some white contrast, so I embossed the text from EABF in white on panel one, knocking off some of the powder here and there to avoid harsh lines and give a more organic look.  I spritzed the paper heavily with water then sprinkled Infusions powder in Magenta mostly in the corners, spraying with water and dabbing with a "flouncy" watercolor wash brush to blend the colors as desired.  I wanted to leave the center a bit lighter. I let this dry thoroughly. 

I then stamped my berries and used Infusions in Sunset beach to color them.  Then I spritzed the panel again with water and the coloring diffused, so I took the paint brush and moved this pigment around where needed to achieve the right asthetic.  I spritzed the entire panel with water and added more of the Sunset Beach along the edges, as described above with Magenta to give a depth of color.  I finished by stamping  some of the collage stamps from the sets in a darker color.  

For notebook no. 2 I opted for dandelions from stamp set EAB52 in place of the berries and the alphabet in place of the Thoreau quote, embossing both in white.  I repeated the process above first with Infusions in Olive Tree, as you see below.  Then to add depth of color I layered with Infusions in A Bit Jaded.

 

With both backgrounds tucked under stacks of books to dry flat, I worked on the focal florals.  I stamped the flowers onto watercolor paper and used the same Infusions to watercolor them, trying to leave the flowers as white as possible, yet with shading for depth.  I really wanted the flower stems to fan out in opposing directions, so for one of the flowers I bent the rubber stamp stem as far as possible in the opposite direction, using tape to secure in place for stamping.  I drew with a waterproof pen the lengthened stems.  

I love to use foam tape to mount my stamping layers in most all of my projects.  I love the dimension it creates!  Since I was making notebooks, which would be handled more, I wanted to strengthen the dimensional stamping for endurance with use.  Often I do this by adding packing tape to the backs of my stamping before fussy cutting, but this time I used black bookbinding tape because I thought it would be nice to have black on the backs of the flowers if it were to show any, and thus coordinate with the black notebooks.

My stamped flowers looked beautiful over the supporting berries and foliage!  I loved the dimension of the flowers popping up, but I glued the stems flat for extra protection and to allow me to layer the absolutely beautiful sentiment "here's flowers for you" over top.

 

Here you can see how that tape trick worked out and I achieved two different looking flowers from the same stamp.  Yay!

I added a tied sari ribbon to each notebook, which can also be flipped inward as a bookmark.  

The pink makes my heart sing this February, but I am a green lover and can see myself using the other journal more so on a daily basis.  How about you?  Or maybe there are a couple of other colors you could combine with your own Infusions powders for a different colorway all together?

I hope these gift recipients will feel warmed by their flower bouquets much longer than a week!  Mostly, I hope you are inspired today to get out your infusions and PaperArtsy flower stamps and make some gifts of your own.  

I particularly loved adding the word Valentine twice at the bottom of this piece and think it would make a great greeting card design too!  Happy Valentine's Day!  xx, Autumn

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