Save the bees and we'll save the flowers

Did you see my Peaceful Poppies flower vase?  Well pop back to the post and you'll see the inspiration for my card today.  Like many of you I'm loving the Painted Poppies and Honey Bee stamp sets from the Stampin' Up! Spring mini.

We really need to support the bees as they are so important to our ecosystems and ultimately life as we know it.  Did you know in the UK alone we have over 270 species of bee.

I like improving my colouring skills with our Stampin' Blends too and this is a great design for blending shades together and also mixing some lighter colours with a darker one over the top.  Be sure with blends to take into account that they are alcohol markers and therefore bleed through your paper and so it is best to use something like the Stampin' Up! thick white card stock and also to consider having a matt layer behind them and not colouring directly onto the front of your card or you will be disappointed with the inside of the card.

You need to stamp in Memento ink as this is perfect for alcohol markers and for this design I also used a tiny little stamp from the Happy Birthday to You stamp set from the saleabration offering to blend ink pad colours for the area above the flowers and around the bee.  I used Mint Macaron and Pool party second and third generation ink to create a type of sky background.

I created thin paper masks of the poppy shapes so that I could overlap the flowers and also stamped a couple to colour and fussy cut to add dimension to my design.  Pop them on with stampin dimensional to add some depth.

My bee was stamped directly onto the card and also coloured with the Daffodil Delight blends and I added a set of vellum wings this time stamped with StazOn ink and then fussy cut also.  If you stamp on vellum be careful not to move your stamp at all once on the vellum, until you lift it off to avoid smudging the ink until it dries.  You can speed up the drying with careful heating using a heat tool.

Although not visible in my photo i also used some clear Wink of Stella to further develop the light spots on my flowers and leaves.

The sentiment is from the Honey Bee set and is a curved stamp which means you can loop it around images like I have here.

Here's hoping that spring will bring us more sunshine and flowers soon.

Happy crafting

Zoe x