There's so much more to a gift..........

 Not just because I was a little late with getting a birthday present to my sister in law, but also because she deserves something pretty, I took a little more time to wrap her gift.  Working on mostly recyclable using brown paper I added some flowers and a handmade tag with a little stamping to make this gift a little more than just pretty.

Using punches, patterned papers and some simple embellishments I created a gift that I'm hoping she found hard to open because the wrapping was so pretty.

The flowers you can simply punch and use a bone folder to gently curl the individual petals up or down and then add punched leaves from the Spring and Leaf Stampin' Up! punches.   Some I scrunched up to add to the texture and some I sponged the edges with a dauber.

Stampin' Up! Floral Essence flower centres are also a perfect fit for the flowers made from the beautiful Dressed to Impress designer series papers from the Stampin' Up! Spring Mini catalogue.

Hopefully I'm forgiven for being late and hopefully the gift has been viewed, but if it stayed on the sideboard for a while to be admired then that would be a real honour.  

For my tag I used the very modern stamp set called Label Me Bold that I also used on my last post with the Peaceful Poppy Elements.  It's got some fun background, splatter type stamps and some very up to the minute font sentiments that do exactly as the stamp set name suggests..... they say it bold and simply. 

If it's your birthday I hope you have a great day. 

Back tomorrow for the Totally Techniques blog hop when we'll share a technique that works for everyone.

Happy stamping 

Zoe x

SHOP NOW

Thinking Outside the Box - We're making folded envelopes

It's time for the June Thinking Outside the Box Design Team Blog Hop.  Welcome to the team's share of folded envelope tutorials.  I've gone for the very simple and well known 'diaper' pouch which sounds marginally better as a tutorial name than a 'nappy' pouch but it is an easy, easy project and one I regularly share with ladies groups or indeed with children as they love paper folding and also the fact that treats go inside this cute packaging.

Step 1
So to get started all you need is a square of patterned or indeed plain paper.  You'll see I have done two versions one for kids and one for the grown ups. The smaller kids pouch started as a piece of 4" x 4" designer series paper.  The adult version is a piece that is 6" x 6".

Step 2

Fold your piece of paper diagonally to form a triangle.

Step 3

Taking the top layer of the paper fold the top point down towards the fold leaving a gap of 1/2" (1cm) approximately. 

Step 4

Fold the flap you created back up to the triangle postion then bring in one side of the triangle to run along the fold created by the flap in stage 3. 

Step 5

Do the same with the other side.

Step 6 

Bring the flap created earlier down over the top finishing the pouch. 

Step 7 

Decorate your pouch

For my decoration I have used the new Stampin' Up!  Floral Essence stamp set.  I stamped the large outline flower onto whisper white card with Blackberry Bliss ink. Before it dried too much I used an aqua painted to carefully pull in some of the outline ink to colour the flower.  It gives a watercolour effect. I heat embossed the centre of the flower with gold embossing powder and punched it out before again using the aqua painter to just colour the remaining smidges of white card.  You can dab off excess ink and water with a paper towel.

TIP Keep the flow of water in the aqua painter to the minimum as it is only ordinary card and you could get bubbles and soggy card.  If you prefer use watercolour paper. 

The leaves were stamped onto Perennial Essence vellum with Old Olive ink  and punched out with the leaf punch.

These pounches are great for table favours for any event and depending on your paper size you can add a gift of choice.  I've added a mini handcream.

For the children you can make mini pouches and snip a small triangle at the bottom to all for a lolly stick to be slotted through the bottom.  This too was decorated with Floral Essence  with the flower and leaves being stamped and the leaves coloured in the same way as above.

 I hope you'll give them a try and don't forget to visit the other global Stampin' Up! demonstrators to see their tutorials and inspo for you.

To shop for any of the products used you can visit my Stampin' Up! online shop.

Thanks for stopping by Stampingscene today.

Happy crafting
Zoe x

1. Tanja Kolar

2. Zoe Tant - You're Here

3. Annette Elias

4. Beate Wacker

5. Aude Barbara

6. Barb Stewart

7. Fiona Carson

New Floral Essence turns into a Poppy.

The Stampin' Up! new catalogue has launched.  Already I have a wishlist as long as my arm and could rejoin as a demonstrator several times over to gain all the new stamps, punches and dies that I want and of course let's not forget the new in colours.  However this lovely set came to demonstrators early and so I've had lots of time to play with it. 

I stamped the flower with Tuxedo Black Memento ink several times and then coloured it with my Stampin' Blends.  I also used a black Stampin' blend to recolour the yellow fuzzy perennial essence floral centres.  I just gently added ink let it dry and did several layers.  It makes an awesome Poppy centre.  To give the flower some depth I then fussy cut out the flowers and cut different layers out of each flower to then build up the flower in a decoupage kind of way. Raising petals with Stampin' dimensionals and also using my bone folder to curl some of the petals.  I stamped and black heat embossed the stem from the new Daisy Lane stamp set and added the flower head with more dimensionals.  I layered my artwork onto one layer of Real Red stamped with the flower image and one layer of Garden Green which I  dry embossed using the Layered Leaves 3D embossing folder.  I used a sponge to add Garden Green ink randomly to the piece.  You could also add ink to the embossing folder prior to running the card through your BigShot as an alternative. 

The simple sentiment is from Rooted in Nature a stamp set I'm pleased to say has carried over to the new 2019 - 2020 catalogue.  You might like to know that my card base is bigger than the usual C6 and is thick whisper white card, but not quite a whole sheet of A4. 

A card I felt was appropriate to share this week of remembrance for all those who gave the ultimate sacrifice during the D-Day landings to give us a better world today.  We shall not forget them...........

Thanks for stopping by today. 

Zoe x