Echinacea

 I was pleased to come across some dies for Echinacea or cone flowers which I particularly like,  but they had no stems so I used stems from a set of Sizzix flower dies.  Found a plain piece of background paper which was a magazine freebie which I over stamped with some trees for a bit of extra interest.

Thankfully we've been having some rain which has slightly cooled things down,  I'm not good with hot and humid conditions.

Tree Stamp - from Chocolate Baroque
Rectangle Dies - Sizzix
Stems - Sizzix dies
Sentiment - produced using Word

Temptation

 I've mentioned before that following blogs often leads me into temptation - seeing stamps or dies which I feel I NEED.  Not so this time when I saw a recent post from the lovely Jules which prompted me to search through my stamps so that I could bring a set out of 'retirement'.  As soon as I saw these flowers I realised that I've had this set of stamps for at least as long as the 10 years mentioned by Jules so I had a rootle around and found them.  I've used scraps of patterned paper to stamp and cut out the flower heads before stamping again in black ink onto an oval of cream card so that I could place the 'cut-outs' onto the stems.  just finished off with some toning patterned paper and a sentiment stamped onto a banner.  Two tiny punched flowers in the smallest scraps of the paper were added to this banner.

Jules mentioned problems writing a post and I've also started to experience similar glitches just recently.  I switched to the new version some time ago and it was fine at first but the main problem now seems to be the double spacing (see below) which I don't seem to be able to clear.  I also have to edit the photos to be the correct size whereas in the past they came in OK.

Stamps - Hampstead floral set by Papermania     

 Banner - Creative Expressions

Tiny Flowers - Stampin' Up punch

Pixie's Challenge #384

Time to visit the Playground again with another card and of course an opportunity to go into the 'hat' for a chance of a lovely prize.  The snippets used on this Christmas card didn't even make it to the snippets boxes because they are left over from various pieces which I printed from a lovely download.  Started off by printing some of the images on cream card - four in fact so I've actually made 4 cards using different images from the same set.  Because I had no card or papers to tone with the colours I also printed off some of the lovely background papers, including some plain coloured ones to die cut for backing the images.  This of course left me with snippets which I then used to die cut the poinsettia and a piece of the cream was used to stamp the greeting and a narrow strip of green behind the image.

Image and Papers - download from Polkadoodles Winnie Winterland

Poinsettia - A very old Marianne die set, comes out every year

Sentiment - from Contempo Christmas Stampin' Up