Decorative Floral Bouquet Easel Card

Hello! Today I’m sharing my Kitty Bee Designs Aloha Friday Challenge mid challenge inspiration. For this challenge, that has a theme of “in the garden”, I’ve chosen to use a pretty floral bouquet image from Sweet Escape Digis’ Etsy store.

I began this card without any real direction in mind. I printed the flowers with my laser printer onto XPress-It blending cardstock and colored it with my Chameleon Pens. I then went back over everything with Prismacolor Pencils to add more depth to each element. I love the final results when finishing off floral images this way.

I fussy cut the entire bouquet and went around the edges with a Tuxedo Black Memento marker, just to give the bouquet a more finished look on its edge. I added some Tuxedo Black Pico Embellisher liquid to the centre of the poppy and some Sparkle Pico Embellisher liquid to the centre of the gerberas. I also added a few drops of Glossy Accents randomly about the flowers and leaves to imitate water droplets and I added Spectrum Noir Clear Overlay Sparkle Pen to the bow. I set the bouquet aside to dry and decided at this point to keep the card relatively clean and simple so the work I had put into the bouquet remained the main focus.

Even though I chose to keep things clean and simple, I still wanted to add a little decoration to the card. I decided to create a shaped easel card and I decided to try out one of my new generic dies from China. This set contains three doily edged circles of decreasing size and I thought the largest die would be perfect to mount a bunch of flowers onto.

I started the card base by cutting a piece of cardstock to 6″×12″ and folding it in half to create a 6″ square card. Then, following my instructional photo below, I placed the doily die onto the card base so that it hung over the edge of the fold slightly, to leave the fold in tact once cut. I ran it through my Big Shot, making sure all the detailed edge had cut fully. I also cut a single doily from Bazzill style textured cardstock for the front panel.

I scored the card front at about halfway down from the fold and glued the front textured panel to the lower half of the card front. I then added gold small dot peel off stickers evenly around the edge of the front panel for a little more decoration and added the floral bouquet with foam tape.

For the inner easel rest, I decided a small oval to place a sentiment on would be enough to add a little more interest while still keeping the card clean and simple. I used another Chinese generic oval die, from a nesting set of six dies, to cut three bases from plain white cardstock and one textured top layer.

I then glued them all together by using an acid free PVA glue in the centre of each die and a tape runner to add dry adhesive to the delicate edge of each layer. The PVA glue allows a little slip while arranging the stack so that the holes in the outer edges can be lined up properly before pressing them together for a firm bond. As I was using this piece to rest the front panel against when opened for display, I didn’t want the edges to come apart over time and the two glues combined gave me that strong bond needed for the task.

To keep consistency in the card features, I added a small peel off sticker sentiment and a few matching flowers to the oval stack. I then glued the oval stack just inside the decorative edge of the card base and pressed it down firmly while it dried. Once dry, I tested the easel mechanism and made sure the front panel would sit comfortably behind the small oval sentiment stack.

I think this card turned out well, with just the right amount of color and decoration from the decorative edged dies, while still remaining fairly clean and simple. Even though, for me, this card became a thank you card, I think it’s a nicely balanced, feminine card that could be used for any occasion, including Mother’s Day that’s not too far away now. I hope you can find time to give this card style a try.

Thanks so much for spending time with me today. I look forward to next time…😊