Playing with clay!

If someone had told me that I'd be making my own flowers and buttons and dozens of other things out of clay to embellish my cards, I'd have scoffed.  Why bother when there are so many embellishments available, right?  Well, guess what!  I'm making my own and loving it.

You're going to have so much fun when you come to my Open House!  We're going to make and colour our own flowers for the awesome card we'll be putting together.  Intrigued?  Well, you should be.

In my last order I received the White Simply Pressed Clay that will be available with the new catalogue.  It's so easy to use and stays flexible even after drying.  It can be coloured by kneading some drops of ink refill into the clay but I found it was easiest to get precisely the colour I wanted for my project by leaving the object the clean white colour of the clay and then using my Stampin' Write Marker to colour it (or an ink pad with a blender pen).

I went a bit crazy using the clay because it was so easy to use.  Not only did I use the Simply Pressed Molds that you can buy for the clay, but I also used a couple of my Sweet Pressed Cookie Stamps.  Actually anything that you can push the clay into will act as a mold and once it's dry you have a brand new embellishment.

The card which I made features the clay embellishments as well as two of the new In-Colors and also the new Mosaic Punch that is also in the new catalogue.  This time, instead of using the punch with the Mosaic Madness stamp set, I used it simply to cut out six of the shapes from the Crisp Cantaloupe cardstock.  Using my Bone Folder, I curved the sides of the shapes to give them some dimension and sponged them with the same coloured ink.  I then layered them in threes to make a blossom.  I also used the leaves framelit from the Secret Garden framelits to cut out two sections of leaves from the new Pistachio Pudding cardstock.

For the rest of the card, I used the Pool Party cardstock as well as the Island Indigo cardstock.  They matched the piece of Quatrefancy Specialty Designer Paper perfectly.  I cut a window out of the designer paper using one of my Window Frames Collection framelits so that I could feature a piece of the printed window sheet from the same Specialty Designer Paper.  Love the result!

Put them all together and what do you get?

I have a hand-coloured clay flower inside the paper blossom as well as at the top left.  The L O V E is made out of the clay as well and then hand-coloured.  For the letters I used one of the cookie presses that was available for Demonstrators, saying "LOVE what you DO".  The "LOVE" letters were the perfect size for my card.  The ribbon I've used diagonally across the top left is some Island Indigo left over from Sale-a-bration.

I absolutely love this card.  The new colours---the new clay embellishments---everything just comes together perfectly.