PAPER PIECED GIRL WITH FLOWER

Have you ever looked  -- and analyzed for possibilities -- at the images from the Birthday Delivery stamp set on page 69 of the big catalog? Adorable images, eh?

But, one of them has always had me puzzled: the little girl with her back to the "camera". Huh?

When I questioned this image, one of my Stamp-In girls suggested that maybe she was meant to be standing in a corner for having been naughty. Maybe. But, what type of occasion would you want to put something with that implied meaning on? "Sorry you've been naughty"?

It is such a cute stamp, and I desperately wanted to use her.

So, I thought she might be more user friendly if she was holding a big flower behind her back.

Thus, that concept was born:

This was the birthday card I made for my sister-in-law. The greeting is from a Paper Pumpkin set. I love the way it looks on the bottom of the card. Even if it wasn't for a birthday, it would work for other occasions as well: Mother's Day? Father's Day? Valentine's Day? Any day on which to celebrate?

To create this distinctive look, I stamped the girl onto a piece of Whisper White cardstock, then cut it out with the oval from the Stitched Shapes Framelits (page 214). 

I went through all my scraps of Designer Series Paper that featured a small enough print that would look cute on a little girl's dress. Picking out several patterns that I thought would work well, I stamped the dress on these scraps. Then it was the process of fussy cutting the dresses. Because of the placement of her arms, each dress cuts out as two separate pieces.

Once the fussy cutting was done, I took all the dresses and adhered them to all the little girls I'd stamped.

I then took the flower stamp from the A Little Wild set (page 108), and stamped flowers on scraps of Whisper White cardstock. I also stamped the flower onto the paper pieced girl so the stem fell between her hands. After coloring a bunch of these flowers in an assortment of color combos, I also fussy cut them. 

As I go through the girl's dresses, I choose a flower that I think would coordinate well with the print, and paper piece the flower in place.

I have quite a few of the little girls all ready to be finished into cards:

Once the difficult work of paper piecing the dress and flower is done, it is easy to choose a suitable one for a card you need to make for a celebratory occasion and put it together easily, using a complementary piece of Designer Series Paper as the background for the card.

Do you have any grand schemes for putting together an otherwise complicated card quickly?

Paper

Pieced

Smiles.