FALLING FLOWERS

Have you ever considered making your own Designers Series Paper? When doing this, you can be as fussy or as simple as you'd like in your design. 

For my card, I chose to go fairly simple, in that I used just one flower design to cover the entire piece of paper. I then used my Stampin' Blends to color in the flowers. 

I used my piece of "Designer Series Paper" in a single card. But, it would be cool if you made a complete 8 1/2" x 11" piece of cardstock into your very own DSP, then use it for a One Sheet Wonder project. Click on the link for a sampling of these sorts of projects I found on Pinterest. In a future post, I will feature cards I made with this technique, although I used actual Designer Series Paper for ming.

Back to my card, when you are stamping a fairly large image -- these flowers measure about 1 1/2" in diameter -- start with the first image somewhere near the center. From there you can work outwards. In this way, it is easy to get the images fairly close together and not get to a point where you have to try to squeeze in one more. Never works.

For my DSP, I used Light and Dark Rococo Rose and Dark Mango Melody Stampin' Blends to color in the flowers. Then, I colored in the entire background in the Light Soft Seafoam Stampin' Blend. Obviously, I started with white cardstock. 

You are probably wondering why I didn't just stamp right onto Soft Seafoam cardstock, rather than taking the time to color in an entire background. Well, think how different the colors of my flowers would be if they were being colored onto a light green cardstock. Pretty muted and not at all true.

I did mount my colored piece onto a Soft Seafoam card base. See how nicely it matches with my colored in background? One of the great things about Stampin' Up! Their color coordination.

Because I used black ink, Memento Tuxedo Black, to stamp my flowers, I wanted to bring the black in a little bit more. So, not only did I stamp my sentiment in black ink, I also matted my label -- cut with Ornate Frames dies -- with black cardstock. That adds a nice balance, and gives it a bit more punch.

A closeup view of my faux Designer Series Paper:

Next time you're in the mood for a little coloring project, why not try to make your own DSP to use as the background for a card? You will get a totally unique card for your efforts.

Faux

Smiles.