Background to Breathtaking - Stampin' Up! Breathtaking Bouquet

 Most of the time Stampin' Up! does a fantastic job of highlighting a stamp sets possibilities in their catalogs.  We see cool layouts, fun color combinations and wonderful artwork from the Stampin' Up! designers.  But occasionally the catalog samples miss the mark or aren't shown off to the best of the stamp set.  Breathtaking Bouquet was done dirty in the Mini catalog in my opinion!  It's a beautiful full card front sized background stamp with leaves and flowers that shows kind of blah in the samples.  I pretty much paged right past it the first several times through the catalog.  Only the one sample really shows it off well; the bottom right hand one on page 31.  The light watercoloring is beautiful but kind of gets lost in the rest of the page layout.  I'm telling you this stamp set is for backgrounds, focal images, water coloring, coloring with Blends, fussy cutting, techniques etc.

  I used Breathtaking Bouquet kind of like the good sample but pulled it forward to be the focus of the card.  With lots of white space around the die cut you definitely see the flowers in all their glory.  And the gold embossing is for good measure too just in case.

  The card base is Pretty Peacock then a layer of Very Vanilla with rounded corners and embossed with the Parisian Flourish embossing folder.

  I stamped the Breathtaking Bouquet stamp in Versamark onto watercolor paper and then embossed in gold.  I used the new Stitched So Sweetly dies to cut the scalloped rectangle shape. It was gorgeous just like that but coloring was what I wanted to do so I got to work with just 3 colors; Pretty Peacock, Flirty Flamingo and Mossy Meadow. 

  I used a blender pen and varied the saturation of the colors for all the different leaves and flowers.  I even mixed a bit of the Flirty Flamingo and Pretty Peacock for a violet shade. 

  After I had my flowers all set I wrapped a bit of gold metallic edged ribbon around the background panel then popped the floral panel up on dimensionals. 

  The sentiment is from Honey Bee and is also embossed in gold.  It fits perfect with another one of the Stitched So Sweetly die shapes. A few adhesive pearls to round out this elegant card.

  So the moral of this card is to really look closely at the images in the catalogs and try not to overlook a stamp set just because the samples don't jump out at you.

  Thanks for looking!  Did you stamp today?

Stamps: Breathtaking Bouquet, Honey Bee

Ink: Versamark, Pretty Peacock, Flirty Flamingo, Mossy Meadow

Paper: Pretty Peacock, Very Vanilla, watercolor paper

Accessories: Parisian Flourish embossing folder, Stitched So Sweetly dies, gold embossing powder, adhesive pearls, metallic edged ribbon, dimensionals, corner rounder