While I'm not overly enamored with this card, I'm so excited about the flowers on it because I cut the shapes to outline a stamp set I own using my cricut (I only wish I was better at centering a stamp on a cut image). It was quite a challenge to come up with the cut pattern to match my stamps. If you try it, I would really recommend using a stamp with clean lines for your first try. The distressed stamp set I used was really challenging. After several attempts to figure out how to do it with this distressed flower stamp set, I finally found that scanning the carrier sheet for my pattern worked better than trying to stamp the image then scan it or trying to draw around the outline to make up for the distressed nature. Then I followed Creations with Christina's steps in Photoshop from this video, but found I had to do a little extra clean up due to the distressed nature of the stamps. But even then, the cutting lines were still a bit too jagged when I tried to import it into SCAL. So this evening I found that I could solve that problem by saving the Photoshop image as a bitmap then importing that into Inkscape. There I traced the bitmap to smooth the cutting lines as if I was trying to make a piecing file from an image. Once the bitmap was traced, then I could save the file and open the svg in SCAL. It took me several hours of trial and error, but eventually I had a SCAL file with cut files for all eleven flowers in my stamp set. Now that I've done what's likely to be the most challenging sets, I'm excited about the possibilities that this opens up.
Anyhow, I ended up spending the whole evening playing in my craft room. I am so going to have to double time packing and shopping tomorrow to make it all work. But it will all be worth it when I'm sipping my wine, watching my TV and crafting to my heart's content.
I use one main color of yellow and a slightly darker color in a few places. I added a little bit of white at the tips and a little bit of brown at the base of each petal and drew in the dark lines that give each petal it's distinct shape.
When I was done, I had this yellow flower, which seemed perfect to use on Mojo Monday's sketch this week (it's the 200th sketch - whoo hoo!). All the paper came from my scraps container, so apparently spending all last weekend cleaning, sorting and organizing my craft room paid off because I can actually find my scraps. This time, I actually do know where the paper came from. The solid orangy-yellow is from DCWV. The orange dotted paper is from My Mind's Eye All Twinkle, Twinkle Little Boy stack, the white and black are Georgia Pacific card stock. I used cinnamon Stickles to give the center of the flower a little bling. I have no idea where the flower stamp came from but the word "cherish" is from Stampin' Up's Warm Words collection.
So, unlike how nice Christina's looked, mine still looked a little plain to me, which is odd because normally I really like a plain style. But this time, it needed something. So I added a mat with DCWV card stock, a little pierced line using my Stampin' Up paper piercer and added some Cotton Candy Stickles to the centers of the big flowers. 
Now you may be thinking, really? I don't even have a Cricut. Or maybe, I have a Cricut but I rarely use the spatula. How can it be that important? 
Zone and bought a little spray bottle of Tsukineko Sheer Shimmer Spritz in a shade called Sparkle. I've never really tried spraying on my layouts or cards but I've really liked when I've seen others using it or similar products. So the little spray bottle has languished in the top drawer of tool cart for probably about three months now. But today I decided it was time to give it a try. First I ran my background paper through the Sizzix with an embossing folder and then sprayed the background (I used my garbage can to contain the spray. It was surprisingly simply and dried quickly. I used some of my stash of flowers, some Irock gems and a little Offray ribbon to finish it off. Yeah for using my stash!
lthough next time I will probably make the void a little bit bigger. I then colored in the flowers with my Stampin' Up pens and sprayed the whole thing with Sheer Shimmer Spritz in Sparkle (and since that little bottle is running out quickly, I'm definitely going to try her spray that she shows how to make here). I then used Inkscape to make the ribbon slide and imported it into SCAL. I added the words "Thanks a bunch" and used my metallic Cri-kits pen to write it then cut it out. Then just layer the pieces and it was done. The picture shows the shimmer mist really well and the light really reflects off the writing much more in the picture. The shimmer mist is really much more subtle in person and the writing is in much starker contrast. 
