Another flower tutorial

I love using flowers on layouts. I think they are so pretty, and they just make a page, you know? But some of those flowers, pheeew, are they pricey... So playing around with a few tutorials, I came up with these. And I adore them.

Supplies:
-a Five petal punch
-paper, of course
-scissors
-a thin, square brush, paint brush
-fast drying glue
-patience

Punch out five flowers:

so, these lil guys are about an inch across, I just wanted to show you that (hence the ruler, which isn't necessary here).
Take one of the flowers and put it in the palm of your hand. Note: if you are going to be using patterned paper, make sure the patterned side is facing DOWN. Now, using your scissors' handle, the more oval one, press it into the center of your palm and rotate it on the flower like this:

You are trying to make a little "cup", like this:

Now, do you see those creases between the petals? Take your scissors and cut a slit almost to the center:

Then, using your paint brush (or any thin, tubey thing), fold each petal around it:

Once those petals are rounded, flip it over and paint some glue on to the slits:



O.k., so take the top petal, and the two bottom ones and bring them together. They are going to overlap, but it's fine; we're trying to make a rosebud.

Now bring up the side petals and hold it for a few seconds so the rosebud doesn't open:

(this is why a fast drying glue and patience are listed). =)

Once those petals don't come apart anymore, you are going to repeat this with the second flower, only up to rounding the petals. You don't have to cut the slits so deep anymore, you can do them a bit shorter. Paint some glue to the inside of the flower (we are leaving the decorated side on the bottom again, since you are going to fold the paper upwards and see the outside only). Place the first rosebud in the middle:

(the shine is from the glue)

Repeat the folding up of the flowers, starting with the top and the two bottoms. You will now have a fat lil' rosebud:

(I forgot to take a picture, sorry)

On to the third flower. Put this flower in the palm of your hand, patterned side up (if that's what you are doing), and make another little cup. Now, flip it over, take your paintbrush (hard end) and twirl it on each petal around the edges, from side to side. You are trying to make the petals into little cups also:

(she's upside down, so you can see the creases)

Cut the slits again, a bit smaller than the last ones and fold the petals to create points:

(like you were rounding the petals inward before, it's as if you were rounding them outwards)

Add some glue to the flower, halfway up the petals, place the rosebud in the middle, and fold up the petals:

(you can play around with the petals, since it'll be a bit harder for them to stick up now.)

You are going to do this two more times with the last two flowers. On these bottom flowers, it's not necessary to make slits, since now they're going to lay more flat. I will say you should try to off set them, not just line up the petals. It makes them look fuller:

(these end up being about a centimeter and a half tall)

I hope you've liked this tutorial. It does take a bit of time, but you can make any matching flower to your layouts now =)

oh, & feel free to ask any questions!

Thanks for looking!
Bean



Because I woke up so early...

I have decided to share this LO with you. (don't look at the time stamp below, I've been up since 7:30 & yes, it's a big deal for me. I went to bed @ 1:30.) I did make this LO Saturday, but since I shared my cards yesterday, I didn't want to over power the post (plus, a LO in a Card-dom post wouldn't make sense.) On to the LO:

I loOove colors! A nice color can change my mood. Pink makes me feel flirty, blue makes me cheerful and sarcastic, green makes me mellow but happy... Black and white make me think of funerals. Atleast when I wear them. Shoes don't really count since nothing else really matches. But shirts and socks? They need to be colorful (socks... ahhh, I have way too many pairs. Although, this dryer seems to be eating some of my favorites...). So I feel the same way when it comes to... everything. It's not that I don't like black LO's, but I will try to break it up with some bright color. Now this LO is mostly because I made those 3 flowers and didn't know where else to put them. Wait, no, I did know I wanted to use them on a scrapbook.com challenge, but I wasn't sure on which one. Well it fell to one of my favorite monthly ones; the no patterned paper challenge. I think it's one of the most inspiring challenges. Patterned paper is everything to a scrapper, and to limit it to only cardstock and everything else is wonderful...

Why the title? I don't know. It just popped into my brain, and since I don't have many inks, I was forced to do this title by hand. I just made sure to make some lines in order to keep the letters relatively the same size and even. (Maybe someone can give me acrylic stamp tips. My ink beads up, and when stamped, doens't look too dark. Anyone? No? Maybe next time...)

I love these flowers. You can find the tutorial HERE. They are really easy to make. Although, I would suggest to run a tubular object around the spiral in the direction you're going to be rolling it. Only because it makes the paper easier to roll without the flower boxing up. I use my glue stick...

Now the background was very easy. I used a pencil eraser dipped into paint. Since I have so many pencils (necessary for pre-calculus), I didn't mind ruining one eraser. It was easy to wipe off and go on to the next color. One dip into a thicker acrylic paint gave me about 3 blobs. I say thicker because the yellow was a bit runny so I had to re-dip for every blob.

Well... I think I'm done. Phew, that tuckered me out... shame I can't take a nap now...

Thanks for stopping by!
Bean

Venturing into Card-dom

It's the weirdest thing. I can't make nice cards. I don't consider myself an amaaaaazing scrapper, but I'm pretty sure I'm getting better, and that I can atleast get an "it's nice" outta people. But cards? Eh. I don't know what it is about them, but I can never find a way to make them nice. I have lots of pretty papers, but when they get put on the card, something's not right. I wonder if this is where the massive amounts of embellishments come in to play, like the flowers, buttons, tags, etc... I don't have a lot of those in my stash. I don't really like them (cringe). I know, it's crazy. But I don't think they'll always match what it is I want. & it's just not my style. I don't like a bunch of things on one page. I like negative space mostly.

Now, it's not like I've never made cards, I have. I do. But I'm not into them too much, even after they are made. So this weekend, I decided to start going through my scrap stash. (Now, here's where my OCD takes effect. I sorta organize my scraps. I make sure that they are cut into rectangles, and I put them together with their matching papers. Now that's just the smaller, not 12" width papers, that's another post... So these scraps are smaller, easier to put in a box to have handy for anything. Yea, I'm weird.) Well I decided to use some scrapbook.com inspiration. There's a challenge to make a card with black, white, orange, green or purple, but atleast three of those colors. Then the other one is to create a patterned paper flower. So here they are:

This one is for the color card challenge. I stuck with black, white, a bit of green and orange. Originally, this card had another flower on it. but I was doodling some spiderwebs and really wanted to use it. So I swapped out the other flower and used the web as the back layer. Which was then the inspiration for this one:

I just used different layers to make this flower. I also folded them at the corners so it would stand out a bit more...

Here's a bit of a close up. I also folded the leaves a bit. One of them kinda stuck out of the paper, but it's o.k.

Now this lil guy, I love. I did a simple doodle. (I don't do well with stamps...) and I just lifted him with a bit of cardboard. If you look at the card, there's a web in the corner, with him coming down from it.

And that my dears was my card attempt for Halloween.

TTYL TFL LOL!
Bean

A few more Layouts...

I am an evening worker, meaning that my shift ends at midnight. I pick my mom up every night, so I'm never home until 1 a.m. So who can sleep as soon as they get home? Most people relax, watch t.v., eat dinner. Well I eat dinner before hand, and I don't have a t.v. I get a lot of scrapbooking done at the wee hours, so here I am to share those.

This is my friend's daughter, who I am totally smitten with. This was the first day I met her, and that face makes me melt.

This is her lovely little face! she has these beautiful eyes that just shine when she smiles at you. Hence the journaling "The sparkle in her eyes can outshine the stars in the sky". That's why I cut out all the stars and used some blue glitter glue to outline the whole layout. All the blue was what I needed to make her eyes shine more.

This layout is about my wonderful hat. My mother made this hat, and I love it. It's blue, which is my favorite color. The paper I used was from a swap, so I'm not too sure who to thank for it, but "thanks!".

One of my favorite title products is chipboard. It's so versatile, and can easily be made to match everything. Here I used the negative of some letters I'd used before. I painted the chipboard with streaks to make it match the paper more. Then when it was dry, I used a paint brush to dip into glue and then glitter to paint it on. That stuff in the middle? Well I pooled in some glue and dropped in some clear 8.0 seed beads. I thought they would make a nice middle rather than paper in the background to make the negative stand out.

Here's another close up of the paint job on the chipboard. All you have to do is paint the background color and use a dry brush to paint the streaks on with another color. You should do it when the background paint is almost dry, that way the colors mix, rather than the top color just paint over it.

Well that's my work for now. And to celebrate, a picture of my new boots! yay!

Have a great day!
Bean

Cousins. & more than that... friends

This layout is for my cousins wife (right) Diana and her cousin (left) Julieth. This picture was taken some time this summer when Diana was able to go back to her town and visit. I love this picture. I think it's so nice to be able to have someone you can be so close with and donate a kidney to...

Ready for some close-ups?

Here we have a butterfly that I cut out on my own. I tend to do that a lot. I have a Cricut, but I can't pull it out for just a butterfly. Plus, I don't have that kind of space. So I cut out the first layer and inked the edges a bit so you can see it. I added a second layer and did the middle with some size 8.0 seed beads. Then I just put together a lollipop flower with a button and the embroidery floss. I add the floss before I stick down the button. Makes my life easier.

Now this little flower is one of my own creation. Listen, scrapbooking can be pricey. There are companies out there with beautiful flowers and I would love to be able to go and buy them all, but I can't. So sometimes you have to make your own. I did this with a 5-petal punch. One of these coming days I'll put up the tutorial. Plus, making your own, you can definately have something that matches!

Well that's all. I used the Recollections brand from Michael's. (I'm not getting any kind of money for saying that, I just thought you might wanna know).

I hope you liked!

Thanks for stopping by,
Bean