Paper Flowers

The other day I filled my little ink pots with 3 drops of 6 colors each. I used Daffodil Delight, Peach Parfait, Pumpkin Pie, Regal Rose, Cherry Cobbler, and Cajun Craze.

I had decided I wanted to play with this new set, Flower Fest, using the Floating Re-inkers technique.

This is the technique where you emboss your images, spritz with water and, using your Aqua painter and ink from re-inkers, drop color on top of the water and it just FLOATS around to create the most awesome color variations.

Well, I learned something new, doing this the other night.

It doesn't work well on Confetti card stock.

The embossing part worked beautifully on the Confetti CS. But the Floating re-inkers technique? Not so much.

The card stock absorbed the ink immediately.

The Whisper White and Very Vanilla card stocks have a coating on them that allows the ink to stay on the surface - and THAT'S what makes the Floating re-inker technique work.

Anyway, back to my Ink Pots.

I played with the Floating Re-inker technique, and when I saw that wasn't working very well, moved on to dying the Paper Daisies we carry in the big catalog (Item 119243 $6.96).

To dye these, I got a couple of the containers our brads come in and moved those 3 drops of ink into the containers, along with a few spritzes of water.

I mixed the ink into the water and then started dropping the paper flowers into the containers.

These guys absorb the color almost instantly!

I had made two colors - Daffodil Delight and Cherry Cobbler. So I dropped one each of the four different sizes of paper flowers into each container, one at a time. After they looked like they'd absorbed as much as they could, I CAREFULLY pulled them out and set them to dry on a paper towel.

These will tend to tear when they're this wet, so you need to treat them gently. I also let them dry sitting on the ends of their petals (I inverted them with the petals down). When they were dry, they had more personality and didn't tend to sit so tightly together when I installed the brad that holds them together.

The large flower posed a small problem - it's bigger than the container. And since I'd done the smaller flowers first, there also wasn't much liquid left in the container.

So, I put the middle of the flower at the bottom of the container and let the ink/water combo be drawn up to the end of the flower's petals.

I rolled the ink/water around, letting the petals absorb the liquid however they wanted to. This meant the flower didn't dye consistently, but sure gave each petal a lot more character! Almost like Mother Nature does! Hee hee

I got some very interesting variations!

Wanna see?



First, here are the paper flowers as you receive them. All are white, all are made from paper.

You can use them as you receive them, or...


You can do this!





Or this!



If you look closely, you'll see I've just alternated colors between the two flowers. And look at the largest one - see all the color variations?

I've layered all four sizes and they're being held together with gold brads.

After I put these together (I made three), they were just crying out to be made into a card...

So I did!

Wanna see?


This was fun to create!

And, just to finish the story I started at the beginning, I was able to color a LOT of images with just those 3 drops of inks!

I'm so frugal (I squeak!) I just cannot throw away even those small amounts of ink! LOL So, I sometimes come up with some very creative ideas of how to use them...

Just a reminder - you'll only be able to order from the Occasions mini for another couple days! Yep, it ends on April 30, 2011.

So, take one last tour through that wonderful little catalog and make sure you've already gotten everything you want/need!

Thanks for stopping by - come back soon!