FUSSY CUT EDGE

If  you have been following my blog for any amount of time, you probably already know two of my favorite papercrafting techniques that I love to do: Coloring with my Stampin' Blends on black and white Designer Series Paper and fussy cutting. Those two time consuming activities are the best possible Creative Therapy for me.

In today's card, I did both of my favorite things. Yesss! 

The photo below shows a few interesting things. 

First of all, look at the far left of the photo. Notice the partial sheet of little colored flowers. Well, I have every single one of the Stampin' Blends ever made. I needed a way to keep them all in order and well at hand. Thus, I found a cute little open flower stamp and stamped rows and rows of them onto white cardstock until I had just the right amount to match the number of markers I possessed. I'd purchased enough of the Stampin' Blends Storage sections to accommodate my huge collection. After sorting all my Markers according to rainbow order -- ROYGBIV -- I also store them with the light variation first. 

Next step was to color in the rows of little flowers in that exact order, after which I labeled each flower with the Marker color name as well as L or D (light or dark). This organization takes up two sheets of cardstock that I put back to back into a sturdy sheet protector, part of which shows up in the photo. I cannot tell you how many hundreds of times I have grabbed this handy resource. This way I know exactly what each color looks like on white cardstock, as well as where I can find specific markers in my Storage tower, since that is set up with the same number of rows as my resource. 

The photo also shows a large portion of the black and white DSP I'd been coloring, as well as the finished coloring on that area. You can see that I chose not to color a portion of this cluster of flowers, in that the fronds were excessive for what I hoped to accomplish. The Designer Series Paper was from the Perfectly Penciled pack in the Annual Catalog.

Finally, the photo indicates which Stampin' Blends I used in my coloring: Dark Daffodil Delight, Light Soft Succulent, Light Mint Macaron, Light Balmy Blue, Light Just Jade, Dark So Saffron and Dark Petal Pink. Obviously I never get rid of any Blends that retire. I keep them all!!

The photo below shows the card held in the closed position with a small clothespin. In an upright position such as this, the card doesn't stay closed completely. I wanted to show how the fiussy cut colored portion lies against the white backdrop.

In the following photo, you can see how uncooperative it is when it's not held shut. But this also shows the detail of the fussy cutting.

A closeup of the whole card:

In order for the fussy cut portion to hover over white, since my card base was in Balmy Blue, I cut away 1 1/4" of the card front, and lined the inside of the card with a 4" x 5 1/4" piece of white cardstock. I had to be very careful in my gluing so that the fussy cut edges lined up exactly. 

I added a tiny diecut "hello" in Petal Pink cardstock, as well as a trio of Polished Dots I'd found on the Clearance Rack. 

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I must have flowers, always, and always.

- Claude Monet -

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Fussy

Smiles.