cheryl nelson should really get half the credit for this!

afterall, it is she (well, ALL the CCCB ladies, but especially cheryl) who made me really LOVE doilies again, and without that little push i would never have made either the dogwood card or this one! but i'm getting a little ahead of myself... first... i should really say...

HELLO, darlings, and welcome to shopping our stash challenge #53 about which the lovely miss carla says this:

May Flowers 

Anything floral related- flowers, floral, roses, sunflowers, gardens, vases, potted flowers, etc; you can use paper with flowers in the design or use flowers as embellies as well (not just limited to floral images).

so that's easy, right? who doesn't love flowers?! whilst i was considering what to make, i was also surfing around a bit, and saw that the doilies and lace challenge at moxie fab world wants us to use a "doily or lace in an innovative way"; then i saw that the current assignment at the order of the opus gluei (where i've not played in waaaaaaaaaaay too long!!!) is ♥SEW WHAT♥ for which they ask us to, well, *sew* on a project. so i started thinking about ALL of those things, and grabbing some supplies, and at the end of a long, inky, painty, stampy, sewing-machine-intensive evening i had this:

(patterned paper: pink paislee; mists and inks in various blues and greens: glimmer mist, maya mist, radiant rain, smooch spritz, ranger re-inkers and distress inks, colorbox pigment and chalk inks;   other: paper doilies, individual fake white hydrangea blossoms from a michaels stem (plus some prima paper flowers), tiny pearls, sewing machine; adhesives: tombow monorunner, gluedots, scotch gluestick)

lovely husband jeff refers to cards of this type as "science experiments" because of the fact that i usually wind up standing at our kitchen sink muttering, whilst surrounded by vials and bottles and sprays, and apparently he always has the vague impression that i *MIGHT* just possibly blow something up. or at least stain it irretrievably. fortunately this time the only things which changed color completely were the (previously white) flower blossoms, the pink paislee mistable "darling doilies" paper, and a tiiiiiiiiny little section at the edge of our dish drainer where i let my stamps dry, which, now that i come to think of it, might have been a bit blue just there when we got it... no, honestly...

i did go a tiny bit crazy with a bunch of different mists; then i used a few understated pattern stamps to add more colors of blue and green in the form of distress and chalk inks, and then, when i had the background the way i wanted, i stamped the top half of donna downey's glorious hollyhocks... which became the "shadow" for my sewn-on petals. at the end, i added bits of real doily to the shiny resist ones on the paper, did a bunch more sewing, and called it a night. 

  

i hope you'll stop by SOS and see the super-inspiring DT examples, before heading off to ♥YOUR♥ crafty laboratory in pursuit of your own wonderful, super-fun, flowery experiments; then link them up before next monday, june (already! can you BELIEVE it?!) 4th!