Flax Flowers (Technique Tuesday Greenhouse Society)

Hello everyone!

Welcome back. It's time to talk about the other half of the January Release from Technique Tuesday: the Greenhouse Society's Flax Flower. Welcome to the family!

I'm always looking forward to the new releases and it's very exciting to get home from work and see a parcel sitting on my bed. It's great when I have a few hours to just sit at my desk and play!

January's release is the Flax flower. It's also known as Linseed, and can grow to over 3 feet. If you include its impressive root system of at least that height, it's definitely taller than I am! The Flax also produces bisexual flowers (they contain both types of reproductive organs) and it can perform self-pollination - how cool is that!

Most flax flowers are a light blue colour, although you can definitely find other varieties. I wanted to stick with the normal colours for now. 

This first card is pretty simple to make! I stamped the flower three times on white cardstock with Memento Ink and then took out my Polychromos pencils. I used just two shades for each of the colours, and used the darker one to add some lines on the petals, indicating a fold or bend. Then I just coloured the rest of the flower with the lighter colour. Nothing fancy here! I then layered this panel onto a light blue piece of cardstock for an extra pop.

Next, I took a sentiment from the pack and embossed it on some Lawn Fawn vellum. I cut the strip down to fit just around the sentiment and folded it around the card front. My front panel is cut to just smaller than the A6 card base I use most often, so it's easy to add vellum to these sorts of cards. I just fold the edges around the sides and tape it at the back! No need to use glue and potentially ruin the front.
Everything' was then placed on the card base using thin adhesive tape (my favourite type of adhesive - gtive me tape over glue almost any day) and that's card one done! I love the flowers on this one.

Next up I wanted to play with a new product I received: the Aqua Flow pens from Tonic Stuido's Nuvo line. These are watercolour pens which come in some gorgeous colours. I purchased them during the Black Friday sales (there was a set of 8 packs going for about $60!) and I've been playing around with them already. I've tried watercolouring before but it never worked well; I've tried pencils, inks and pan sets. It looks like I've finally found something that I can work with.
I used two blue colours for these flowers. The brilliance with watercolours is that you can blend them out - the darker blue is actually a lot stronger than this, but you wouldn't know!

I stamped the Flax flowers using Memento Ink on watercolour paper, waited a bit to make sure the ink wouldn't run, and then played with the blue colours.
Once it was all dry, I cut out the flower using the die supplied with the set, and looked and what I could do to compliment the flowers with a design.

I settled on cutting black cardstock and placing a strip down the bottom of my card base, stamping the sentiment on the top left, and adding flecks of black ink.
Then I used Glue Dots from Columbus Trading (layering them a few times to give some more dimension) and placed everything onto my card base.
I added some Nuvo Drops for extra effect, added some white gel pen to some petals, and that's card two finished.

Lastly, I decided to go back to using the large die from Technique Tuesday's Essentials Stitched die set. I stamped the Flax flower in embossing ink and then embossed white powder on it. Then I blended the section using Distress inks to do a ink-resist look.
Next, I used watermark ink on the bottom of the flower stamp, where the bottom of the flowers would sit on my blue cardstock panel, and layered the tag on top it using foam tape. This way, it looks like the flowers continue out from under the layers.

I then placed this onto a folded A6 card front. I stamped the sentiment from the sent in blue ink, and went over it with an ink pen.
Lastly, I added some white nuvo drops, and card three was done. This was a lot simpler to do - maybe next time I'll add some light pencil colouring in the embossed edges to jazz it up a bit more.

That's it for now! I'm sure to make some more projects with this stamp. Let me know what you make with this month's release, be sure to tag me on Instagram if you've been inspired by me!

Until next time,
Shana xx