Poinsettia card

Good Monday Morning Ladies,  

I hope that you all had a good weekend and are ready to start a new week.  We had quite a leisurely day yesterday,  lazy morning,  late brunch and then we went for a browse around a nearby garden centre, they are never just 'garden centres' these days though are they?   I heard a man complaining because he couldn't find a specific plant, he was saying to the lady gardener "maybe if you focused on selling plants and garden tools as the name would suggest rather than all of this other rubbish', he went on "tell me how many people come to ghe heart if the cotswolds to a garden centre to buy Grimsby fresh fish ", he did have a point there!   The girl just radio'd a manager to come and help him.   In fairness in amongst the aisles of nonsense we did find a couple of fun gift ideas.!  Mr Yorkshire wasn't paying those premium prices though, we took photos to search online, I did dare to suggest cuppa and a piece of cake, in fairness the queue was huge, but we went with buying some viennese swirls and taking them home where the tea cost pennies and you can have as many refills as you like!  The viennese whirls just melted in your mouth 😍 !  We got home and started to sort dinner,  Soph has requested beef stew and dumplings,  I might try baking them on top of stew in the Aga, so they get  crispy top this time!  Lucy hates dumplings so she is having mashed potatoes with hers and some deliscious dark spring cabbage with lots of butter 😋 

I had a lovely little craft session on Saturday morning, I usually like to spend the weekend with Paul as I barely get any quality time in the week, he was busy in the garden so I decided to have a play at my desk.

Having my sprays out on show on racks in my line of sight really helps to prick my conscience into using them,  I saw a card with a smooshed/spritzed background and that was all the inspiration I needed, I took what sprays I thought would work in both Distress Spray stains and Distress Mica stains and got busy spritzing 

I thought it needed a bit more coverage in the centre so I smooshed some Evergreen Bough onto my craft mat and tapped my background onto it a couple of times taking care not to lose all of the little spots and dots!  It doesn't pick up on camera but the Mica Spray 'Tree Lot' has added sparkle to the background too.   Next step was to die cut my TH Poinsettia and leaves,  it didn't occur to me until I was assembling the card that these leaves are more like Holly leaves as Poinsettia don't really have leaves (or they have coloured leaves and no flowers) 🤷‍♀️

To make the flowers/foliage a bit more festive I added sparkle to the top layers,  so the poinsettia flowers were die cut in Cheery Cobbler card, I then added some of the new Distress Spritz in Barn Door,  after drying I wasn't happy with the colour,  the spritz made it look a little pink,  so I tried blending a little cherry Cobbler ink over the spritz, I was delighted that the red returned and the sparkle was still sparkling!  The leaves were die cut in Garden Green and top layer spritzed with 'Tree Lot' Mica stain, I loved the colour immediately 😍

I assembled the layers adding a little sparkly yellow in the centre of the flowers.                                            I layered the background onto  matt gold card and then onto a 6 x 6 inch card base, arranged the flowers and leaves and decided to add the holly berries too. I was going to add some white splatters but I had assembled the whole card and i was too afraid that I'd get 1 big splatter that would ruin the whole card.   The sentiment is from a TH sticker book and was in a matching green, I layered it up the same as the card to finish. 

I hope that your week gets off to a great start, 

Love & hugs to all of you, 

Sandra xxx