Flowers & Friends - Three Cards

 Wow, I'm finally continuing on a challenge I set for myself almost three years ago. I set as my "mission" the task of using ALL of my Stampin' Up! sets, and I have a LOT of sets. (Nearly 200.) I was pretty faithful in working on them for quite a while, but then life got in the way, and I also kind of lost interest. But, a few days ago I got out another stack of stamps and got to work on them.

The set that I used for today's cards is called "Flowers & Friends." It consists of nine stamps. I have used them all on these cards. For this first card, I used the flower pot stamp, the tulip stamp and the other flower stamp. I cut out the flowers and the top part of the pot and mounted them on Pop Dots. I hand-drew the stems. I matted with purple. After adding the cut-out pieces, I thought it looked kind of plain, so I added the speckles with an old SU! set called Itty Bitty Backgrounds. I think I added too many speckles and couldn't reach the middle, but I still think it looks better than it did without them:) I added patterned paper to the entire card front. The sentiment is from The Paper Studio set. I also added gem stones to the flower centers.

 For this second card, I used five more stamps - the stem, the leaves, the flower, the butterfly, and the bee. I stamped the stem in green, the butterfly and the bee in black, and then embossed that piece with a Cuttlebug folder. I also stamped the butterfly, the flower, the leaves and the bee on white scraps with colored inks and cut them out. I glued the butterfly and bee on, and added Pop Dots under the parts of the wings that extend beyond the edge. I also used Pop Dots under the leaves and the flower. An enamel dot adorns the flower center. I added Star Dust Stickles to the bee's wings. The sentiment is from the same Paper Studio set. I cut it out with a Memory Box die and mounted it on Pop Dots.

This card uses the last stamp of the set. I inked the entire stamp with the lighter blue ink, then colored the beak and legs with markers. I stamped the bird again on a scrap with a darker blue, cut it out, and mounted it on Pop Dots and added it to the already-stamped image. I cut out that panel with a Memory Box die and added the sentiment - from the same set as above. I cut out a piece of patterned paper with another die and added the pieces to the card base. Then I added a tiny black gem for the eye.

Wish me luck as I continue with this project. I think I'm only about half done with my sets, and the sets are getting bigger so I haven't even used half of the stamps yet!

Thanks so much for stopping by, and I hope you'll come back and visit again soon!