So Many Roses

This may be a longer post than I normally do, but the card is beautiful so it's worth it!  I am on the board at Megan's school and my fellow board members and I decided that we were going to surprise Anne, our amazing school director, with some flowers and a gift card.  Well obviously I had to make a gift card holder and obviously it had to be special and big enough for the board to sign.  I remembered I had some 7x7-ish size envelopes so I decided that would be my card/gift card for Anne.  To make the card 7x7 I cut one piece at 7x7 and one piece at 7x8.5.  On the longer piece I scored it at 1.5 folded it over and adhered it to the back of the 7x7 piece.  Then you have a full 7x7 card just made with 2 pieces of cardstock.  Larger cards are more challenging.  So I just decided to fill the card with roses.  Many, many, many, roses! 

I used the Picture Perfect stamp set and I stamped the roses, I don't even know how many I did, I didn't use all that I stamped.  Then I stamped the leaves-oh so many leaves!  With all these roses and leaves I really didn't use that many ink pads.  I specifically went with yellow and pick roses, because I looked it up and those colors symbolize friendship and appreciation.  Here's the colors of ink I used.  For the yellow roses: Daffodil Delight, Crushed Curry and Delightful Dijon.  For the lighter pink roses: Blushing Bride and Melon Mambo (the middle layer of the roses stamp off on scrap paper with the Melon Mambo first).  The darker pink ones: Blushing Bride, Melon Mambo and Rose Red.  The leaves: Old Olive and Garden Green (stamp the first layer of the leaves with Old Olive stamped off on scrap paper first).  Then I fussy cut ALL the rose and ALLLLLLLL the leaves.  I figured out where I wanted all the roses and stuck them all down using dimensionals.  Don't judge, there's probably 5 or 6 Dimensionals on the back of every rose, you can do the math.  After all the roses were down I used the leaves to fill in gaps and to surround the flowers.  I knew I wanted to layer some of the leaves under the layer layers of cardstock the flowers were on so I made sure to save some.  So some are glued onto the same layer as the flowers and some are glued on the base of the card.  It gave lots of dimension and really brought the card together.     

The flowers were all stuck down on some vellum, then white that was stamped with the splatter from Gorgeous Grunge, then Melon Mambo cardstock.  I embossed in gold the greeting.  To finish the front I used pearls, scattered here and there.  Then there was the inside.  

I mentioned that I wanted a gift card holder inside.  I went pretty simple with the gift card holder and just used the envelope punch board to make it.  I attached some doilies behind it and used and extra rose and some leaves.  Pretty simple, I wanted to leave plenty of room for board members to sign.  

Finally the envelope.  I didn't go too crazy with the envelope but I did want it to be more than just my handwriting on the front so I pulled out my Larger Than Life Alphabet set.  This set is retiring.  I love it though.  I don't normally keep my retiring stamp sets, but I'm really considering it with this set.  The letters are large (hints the title).  But they're great for monogram stuff, school stuff for the kids (think big projects, poster boards, etc).  If there's an alphabet set to get I think this is a great one!  Back to the envelope.  The envelope I used was slightly textured so the stamps weren't stamping solidly (you can see this in the second half of the 'n' and the 'e'.  To get them looking more solid I painted over each letter with the Wink of Stella clear pen.  It smoothed everything out and it gave it some fun shimmer!!!!  You can also see my pencil marks on the envelope to make sure that I stamped it straight and in the middle.  Do them lightly and you can erase them when you're done.  Just a few quick tips for you :)

Thanks for looking, see you soon!!!