Mothers' Day with a punch

I have been asked by a friend to make a card for her to give her mum on mothers day. I know that the lady in question adores pink and just loves flowers so here is what I came up with.

I decided this card would fit the challenge for March over at Creative Connections which is a great community of people from all aspects of the crafting world. 

This design evolved out of the White on White card I made and posted about a few days ago. I used a pinflair peel off verse as the centre piece, mounting it onto a very pale ivory card and cutting round it I then used it to cut the aperture into a piece of plain pale ivory A5 card and to get the measurements to cut a rectangular aperture in an an A5 card blank. 

I used a pretty patterned pink paper form Papermania's Colour Capsule collection to line the inside of the card cutting a rectangular aperture and folding the edges of the paper around the aperture to get a neat edge. I closed the card and positioned the verse through the aperture to ensure it was central. 

I used a piece of acetate from some packaging to cover the rectangular aperture which I stuck to the front of the card using double sided tape.  The piece of plain ivory card that I had previously shaped was then embossed using a flowers and swirls embossing folder from cArtUs. It is only an A6 folder but after I had embossed the top half of the A4 piece I turned the card round to emboss the bottom half, matching the pattern up so there is no visible join line. 

Whilst I had the sizzix out I also cut and embossed 4 pieces of the ivory card using the Anja border die cut from the Marianne range, and I cut about 12 of the smallest flower on the Tim Holtz Tattered Florals die from Ranger just using 100gsm copier paper.

Then the hard work started I cut the leaves using the x-cut punch and emboss ivy leaf die and the flowers using a die I have had in my stash for years and also the daisy shaped punch from a perfect pairs set from Tonic, which I treated myself to recently, and the butterflies were punched using an x-cut dimensions punch. I just used plain white copier paper in 80gsm. 

I then coloured the leaves and flowers using a selection of promarker pens - the advantage of using promarkers for this is that the colour goes all the way through the paper so there is no white left showing. I put an old envelope underneath to stop the ink going onto my table (more about that later). I also used a gilding pen to colour the Anja borders in gold. The gilding pen is on it's last legs and I had to dab the nib several times to get the ink to flow again using the old envelope. This left me with an envelope that had beautifully blended pinks and creams with flecks of gilding and it has now been punched into flowers for a birthday card for my sister-in-law, but I digress.

Now I had all the components for the front of the card I started by layering the Anja Lace borders down the left side of the card overlapping and intertwining the border in the centre, I then trimmed the remaining borders to fit at top and bottom. 

I made up the roses from the small flowers I had cut using the Tim Holtz die, I made up the daisies by interlocking two daisy shapes together and shaping the petals back before using an embossing ball tool to shape them further. I arranged these with the leaves and the tiny blossom shapes around the right side of the aperture and added the butterflies along the Left had border.

I hope my friend likes the card and that it makes her mum feel really special when she receives it on Mother's Day.

I have entered this card into the following Challenges 

http://creative-connections.ning.com Mothers Day

http://trimmiescraftchallenge.blogspot.com Mothers Day 

http://colorthrowdown.blogspot.com/ I didn't have the exact colours specified but I hope the ones I used are close enough

http://craftycatzweeklychallenge.blogspot.com - Punches and die cuts