Crafty Ann's GDT card - National Flag

 I was so happy when Ann asked me to be the Guest Designer for June over at Crafty Ann's Challenge blog as I love working with Ann's images and papers - they are gorgeous and so reasonable in price too ( pop over to Crafty Ann's Digi Shop and have a look. I've got to admit this weeks challenge did make me scratch my head a little at first,  we are challenging you to use the colours of your national flag in celebration of the world cup which is starting on June 11th (you can add skin colours/gold/silver/leaves etc though). Anyway I got my thinking head on and came up with this using red and white the colours of the English flag which is St. George's Cross. I've also used the design of the flag as the basic layout for my card.

I've made an 8x8 white base card and used a 7.5" square of red card behind 4 mats of white card which I put through my cuttlebug using the swiss dots folder. The next bit was the fun bit. I printed off a couple of sheets of  Crafty Ann's Abstract 2 Brights Collection in red (I love this pattern, so vibrant!!) and then put it back through the printer and printed Crafty Ann's Long Petal Flower over the top of both sheets.

I then cut the petal layers and leaves out and curled them round my pokey tool to give them a bit of dimension. I gave the petal layers a good blast of cosmic shimmer mist in Lava Red for a little extra bling and left them to dry. Once they were dry I layered them up and added gold microbeads to the centres of the flowers. Next came the leaves, as I'd printed them out on the red abstract BP, I had a heap of lovely red leaves. As I'm a bit of a meany I didn't want to waste them so I turned them over and coloured the backs with promarkers and then embossed the veins with my little ball tool to give the leaves a bit of texture.

All that was left to do was arrange the flowers on a circle of red card and pop the leaves in around the edge. I've really loved using these flowers, I've used them as the focal point on this card but they'd make beautiful embellishments for any card. Ann was one step ahead of me too, anyone who visited Ann's blog last week will have noticed that she now has a range of these fabby flowers precoloured!!

Thanks for having a peep at my card, I do hope you'll join us over at Crafty Ann's Challenge. After all the world cup is something to celebrate for us crafters - while our menfolk are glued to the tv we can craft in peace lol

Claire xx