Homemade Embellishment - Layered Flowers

Hello everyone!  Today's cards (I have two) show a technique for making your own round layered flowers.

Here is how I made the flower in the first card.  Remember that you can make your flowers in any size and with any papers. That's what makes this so great!  You have flowers to match anything that you do!

1. I started with four pieces of paper about 3 x 3 inches each.  I embossed them each with a different pattern to give more interest.

2. I took my first piece of paper that I wanted to be the center of my flower and cut out a circle. I didn't use a punch or make a perfect circle.  Part of the charm of these flowers is that they are not perfect.

Once I cut out the center, I laid this on top of the second -piece of paper and cut a circle out slightly larger than my center.

3. I continued cutting circles, each slightly larger than the one before.

4.  Once the circles were all cut out, I punched a hole in the center of them.  My circles were large so I could only use a hole punch in the smaller ones. I used an eyelet punch for the rest.  Remember that the holes need to line up with one another.

5. I decided to add a little shimmer to a couple of the layers.  I sprayed Perfect Pearls mist in green on the green layer.

6. Then I crumbled the still wet paper to create wrinkles.  I decided that i liked the wrinkles so much I sprayed (lightly) a mist of water on the circles and crumpled them also (except the center one).

 7. I sprayed the center circle with gold Perfect Pearls.  The gold settled into the cracks of the embossed image.  Doesn't it look great?

 8. While I was waiting for my circles to dry, I printed out some sayings onto an ivory cardstock using my computer.  I cut these out with some spellbinders dies to make my sentiment that would go on my card.

There are several really great websites for getting fonts, many of them are free.  I used http://www.1001freefonts.com/  and http://www.craftedge.com/products/fonts.html (especially great!).

 9. I edged my sentiment in red brick distress ink and sprayed some more gold on it.  I mounted it on my card with mounting tape (three layers) and curled the edges back.

Here is my card again at an angle.

I assembled my flower using a pink ribbon.  I doubled my ribbon and carefully put it through the holes I had punched each layer one at a time (like stringing beads).  Actually I found that my holes were too small so I cut a slit in the hole to make it larger so the circles would go on my ribbon more easily without ripping.

The tails of the ribbon you can see at the top of the card.  I used a dressmakers pin and hung some charms from the middle so that the ribbon wouldn't pull out.

For this smaller flower version, I used a brad to keep all my flower layers together.  (The sentiment at the bottom of my card is printed on transparency film.  Did you know that you can buy transparency film at Staples, or other office supply store that is made for ink jet printers?  You can make your own transparencies!)

I attached my transparencies by running them through my Xyron first.

I hope you liked seeing this technique.

Come back again!

Lis