The Flower Challenge #13 and its our 1st Birthday!!!!

Your not going to believe it but its been one whole year since The Flower Challenge began and we are celebrating big time!!!!!!!!!! There are so many amazing prizes for you to win and even some codes to save you some money, so you definitely want to join in the fun this month!!

I still can't believe its been over a year since the fabulous Aileen asked if I would be interested in joining the Design Team for a new challenge revolving around flowers. Its been a fantastic journey and the challenge has grown so much. I'm extremely lucky to be on a team with all these talented and supportive women and have loved getting to know them even more. And yay for all the companies that are designing such gorgeous floral stamps and designs these days, you need somewhere to display those projects right??!!

So for this months theme we want you to 'Use Your Favourite Flower'. If your lucky enough to have a stamp image, die or stencil of your favourite one then we would love to see it. However if you don't, how about you make us smile with projects using your favourite floral stamps/dies/stencils.

This is exactly what I did, I used one of my favourite stamp/die sets from one of our Sponsors Neat and Tangled. Danielle (the owner of Neat and Tangled) very generously offered one of their popular floral stamp and matching die sets as a prize for this challenge:

 
I have never made a triple-fold card before in my life. I was really needing to create a card for this challenge and while I was trimming one of my hedges I suddenly had this card idea in mind. It opens up like this:

 

It took me FOREVER to work out how to partially die-cut the floral heart but got there in the end. The weird thing was when I went to bed that night, I went on to YouTube and Jennifer McGuire had just posted this video about 'partial die-cutting'. How cool did I feel to be on the same wave-length as Jennifer McGuire!!!!

Here's how I put this together. I cut a strip of white CS 11.5 inches long, 4 1/4 inches wide. I scored it at 3 1/8 and 8 1/8 and folded the flaps over. Now this was the tricky part. 

I put the Floral Heart Die on the longest flap with the bottom of the heart being right on the edge. I opened the card longways and put it on the bottom cutting plate. The top plate was only put over the end of the die where I wanted it to cut too. Basically I had to carefully put it thru the Cuttlebug with more than half of the top plate hanging off the end over nothing and hold it in place until all the plates met between the rollers and then roll away. And it worked!!! I was so happy and then I just had to use a blade to cut across each side to release the bottom of the cut panel.

I stamped the Floral Heart image on the cut panel and coloured with my pencils. The 'celebrate' die was cut once from gold CS and twice more from white CS. I glued them all together for some dimension and then over the heart. For the bottom sentiment I simply stamped it with Versamark ink and heat embossed with gold powder. And I added some green, blue and gold sequins for a bit more bling!!

All of the products used on this card are from Neat and Tangled and thank you so much Danielle for your generous prize for one of our lucky entries this month!!

You have until Wednesday 25th October to link your projects to The Flower Challenge and if your mojo is lacking and your in need of inspiration, please pop over to the blog to see what my amazing team mates have created just for you!! And you will also find all the information and the HUGE list of prizes up for grabs this month.

Thank you all for supporting this challenge, it really means a lot to us and I'm sure the next twelve months will zoom along even faster!!

Take care
Shona