Sending Smiles & flowers card

Today I thought I'd share the card that I made in our group Facebook  Dreamees craft swap whilst in the second lockdown. As it is also the first blog challenge of the year for us at Let's Craft and Create I also thought It would be a nice project to start the year off.

Our theme for January is Cheers to you, and as with all our challenges, there is an ATG option.  It's been a challenging year for everyone, with very little to celebrate, so why not send a card to a friend to give them a reason to smile today.

I decided to use the Dreamees Autumn Haze paper pad and make some flowers to pick up the colours in the papers.  I chose an easel card as I thought it would support the half-moon display of flowers.

For my flowers, I stamped and die cut my flowers using the Dreamees Beautiful Babysun stamp and die set using the denim sparkle dinky inky pad on some textured aubergine coordinations Tim Holtz card stock from my stash and patterned design paper from the  Dreamees Autumn Dreams paper pad.

I only had white pollen stamens by the Dreamees, so decided to colour them to tie in with my project using the honey sparkle dinky inky.  The colour really well, especially if you juice the pad a bit with the matching reinker. That way you can have stamens whatever colour your wish. 

I added a little foliage from the same Beautiful Babysun die set using some soft green card and a few green frosted berries, with a little sisal between the layers. I've used the smallest dies from the oval Loops & Lace dies collection for my sending smiles sentiment, which was from the Dreamees Cute bun stamp set.

I used the woodgrain design paper from the Autumn Haze paper pad as a faux wood plaque for the card topper and mirrored it through as a stopper for the card, saving one of the larger flowers for the centre stopper on the card.

I really enjoyed making this card for the lovely Erika and hope she likes it. I also made some ATCs too. Haven't made these in a while.

I heat embossed the dreamcatcher from the Dream Big stamp set with gold embossing powder and the Heartfelt Hedgehogs with my sparkle dinky inkies and then sprinkled clear embossing powder over the top and embossed. I used my sparkle dinky inkies to colour my stamps in too as well as the simple background.

 For Erika's name, I used the some past Dreamees alphabet stamps as the letters were smaller than the current Caligraphy set, although, I did use the capital E from this set.

The little card pocket I made was just to keep the cards together and I may make her more in the future that she could add to it.

These craft swaps are great and a good way of connected other crafters especially during these lockdowns where so many people have felt isolated and struggled with their mental health. 

Our design team have also been busy this month with projects of their own and there is always lots of fabulous inspiration shared by the crafters on our blog too. If you are interested,  there is a prize for the winning entry, following our theme and a badge for your blog for the top 3 runners up. Just click on the link below which will take you to our blog challenge. 

Enjoy your day whatever you are doing.

Happy Crafting