Concord & 9th April Guest Designer

Hello, friends!  I'm so glad you dropped by today.  I'm very excited and so honored to be guest designing this month for Concord & 9th, and I can't wait to share my first 2 cards with you.  Today I'll be using the new stamp set Flourish.

I wanted to show you how you can get very different looks from this one fabulous stamp set.  My first card uses the stamp set as it was intended to be used.  The branch and leaves are all one stamp, and the large pink flower, small blue flowers, and the yellow buds are separate stamps.  There are also layering stamps to add to all of the pieces.  This gives you many options for stamping different colors.  On my card below I stamped the large pink bud 2 times, once on the card base and a second time on a separate piece of card stock which I fussy cut and popped up to give my card a little more dimension.  The sentiment is from the stamp set also, I stamped it on black card stock using VersaMark ink and embossed in white.  I added a strip of patterned paper on the left side, did a little bit of splattering, and finished with a few black sequins.

My second card is very different from the first, the look is much softer.

For this card I used a technique that I first saw on Kristina Werner's blog several months ago.  To make my card I first stamped the stems, leaves, and flowers with white pigment ink on Kraft card stock.  As you can see, I stamped them in a different arrangement than I used on my first card.  I also stamped some of the leaves individually to fill in my design a bit more.  After the white pigment ink was dry (I used my heat tool to speed up the process), I stamped on top of it with Wplus9 inks.  You can use any dye ink, or I would think it would work with colored pigment inks too.  When you're stamping the colors try and stamp them slightly "off" so that some of the white shows around the edges.  I heat embossed the sentiment in white and added a few clear droplets.  I really love how this turned out.

I'll also wanted to show you the card below that I first I posted several days ago for The Challenge, it also uses Flourish and shows yet another look you can achieve with this set.

Here I stamped some of the flowers, and a single leaf, in a random pattern.  I did cut one of the leaves from the large branch/leaf stamp, I know that this would make some people cringe but I have no problem cutting my acrylic stamps apart (I promise they didn't cry ;)  It's very easy to put them back together when you need to. 

So there you have it, 3 different looks from one very fabulous stamp set!  I'll be back next Thursday with another blog post using another wonderful new stamp set from the April Concord & 9th release, Crazy Awesome!  Hope you'll join me then!