...Day 2 Spring Baskets

Good morning, this is a long post! You may need coffee/tea!

On Thursday I will be releasing 4 new clear photopolymer stamp sets!!! and today I'd like to introduce you to Spring Baskets!

Yesterday Belinda and Laurie peeked some of the images from Spring Baskets and today Anya and Julia get in on the fun

My first card uses the basket image paired with the floral group that you might have spotted on Laurie's blog yesterday. A very simple bit of masking allows the leaves of the floral bouquet to overspill the basket at the front. At the end of this post I'll show you how I did that. All of the other 'basket filler' images in the set my be simply stamped into the basket and do not require any special masking. They're easy peasy.

I stamped my basket and flowers in Memento rich coffee ink and coloured with copics.

See that teeny butterfly?, that's a separate stamp so you can stamp him anywhere! I have him basking on a flower. He has two mini bumble bee buddies in the set! I just love being able to add a little life to a bouquet in this way. It's a left-over from when my father would have my mother add a little fox or pheasant to her oil paintings, he always said that all pictures should have a little life in them no matter how small! lol, I liked that.

I used a white gel pen to pop a few highlights onto the leaves etc.

Below you can see how I sliced around the bottom edge of the overhanging leaves with my scalpel and sort of curled them up a little, I think it helps add a little depth, along with the bow, I just stamped the basket handle again and cut out the bow, raising the loops a little when I stuck it onto the coloured basket.

I cut the image out with a classic circle Spellbinders die. I used a slightly larger circle die to emboss a frame into the card base. then I masked the embossing and stamped some polka dots from the Off Beat Backgrounds set in versamark. A strip of green ribbon and the card was done! I left off a sentiment as I quite often need a card in a hurry and I can put whatever sentiment I need on the inside at a later date.


A neat trick that you can do with the basket image from this set is to make it into a tall, fancy basket by adding the little urn image to the bottom of the basket. Again, I will show you how to do this at the end of this post, it's a super easy thing to do and gives you two completely different styles of basket, and you also have the little urn image that works well with the daffodil image and the floral group from the first card.

I used mine to make a card for my mum. The sentiment, also from Spring Baskets, would be good for Mother's Day or a birthday or just because.

I used Memento rich cocoa again and copics. This time I made a tall basket and filled it with daffodils, a true spring flower.

I coloured an large bow, a separate stamp, and cut it out to place on the front of the basket before simply stamping the sentiment underneath. As I was outlining my coloured image with a pale grey copic to help ground it, I decided to outline the word Mum just to give it a little more emphasis.


I really love how this image looks when it's all coloured up! The basket weave pattern on the basket and urn makes my simple colouring look like it took a long time. You could really work this up and add shadows and highlights but i simply applied a pale tan allover the basket and then went back in with a darker tan and filled in the negative shapes, it was done in a flash.

If you look at the bow that I cut out (see below) I coloured the edges with the yellow copic after I cut it out, it makes the cut image look so much neater, you don't get little white raw edges catching your eye!



My last basket card today features the tall version of the basket again but this time it holds some lovely decorative eggs! I just love this basket, I love complimentary colours together, the orange and blue have a real zing, and it's absolutely nothing to do with the spring coloured hole in my copic collection!!! lol, I'm itching to colour some baby pink and soft blue/green eggs but the LSS where I get my copics was all out of spring shades!! aarg!

I do like the orange and turquoise tho, I used a separate single egg stamp to make the background patterned paper, all three eggs featured in the basket come as separate whole-egg stamps too!


A fancy Spellbinders tag die cut holds the sentiment also from Spring Baskets.



The How-to-s

Basket of flowers with overhanging leaves.

Start by stamping the floral group onto your cardstock.


Stamp it again onto a post-it note. Trim out the image on the post it note. you can see that I only needed to trim closely around the bottom. I just cut close to the edge around the top but didn't worry about the ins and outs. Stick the post-it note image right on top of the stamped image on your cardstock. Take a second to make sure it's lined up as best you can.


Stamp the basket image over the floral group as shown above. When you remove the post-it note mask you will have a lovely basket full of flowers. See the first card, this was the exact image I used to make it.

To make the tall basket

First stamp the urn image.


Take a post it note and lay it across the urn so that there's only a little of the top of the rim peeping out. See the photo below.


Stamp the basket image over the post it note. I like to line it up so that the footer of the basket is completely on the post it note.This way the footer is eliminated from the final image and the lip of the urn makes a row of decorative weaving across the basket. Couldn't be easier.




Hope it tickles!!!

Don't forget to join me tomorrow for more samples and links to the DT ladies who will be joining me in introducing the new stamps for this release. And, bookmark Thursday you won't want to miss the blog hop and prizes!!

Thank you for stopping by and now that I 've used up your morning you are free to go!!!lol!!