A SunFLOWER(s) Day!

I had a great need to do a sunflower card the other day. Not sure why... but I wanted sunflowers and nothing but.. sunflowers. Melanie Muenchinger's newest set, "Pressed Flowers" and her older set, "A Year of Flowers" was perfect in every way for what I wanted. Not only did I use the outlined sunflower from "A Year of Flowers" to make my DP, I used it to line up my sunflower image from the "Pressed Flowers" set as my focal image. I have long loved Melanie's "A Year of Flowers" and when she came out with the "Pressed Flowers" I couldn't get it ordered soon enough! Now you might look at the sunflower and think I simply colored the image in with my Copic markers and did a bit of blending. Well.. that was not the case. I used the solid Sunflower stamp and my Memento Markers to color before applying it to the card stock. I LOVE how this looks and honestly, it is much faster than coloring and blending the colors. Now I DID want to offset my outline of the flower a bit and trust me... I am NOT good at lining things up on purpose without a Stamp-a-ma-jig. But somehow the closer I got to actually stamping... I just couldn't. LOL I am sooooooo much of a "wannabe" perfectionist in my little stamping world!!! I just HAD to grab my Stamp-a-ma-jig and well.. make it fit. LOL So I'm a little weird that way. But I DO expect just a bit of credit because when I stamped the leaves... I did just that... left them a bit out of whack so that you could see the white outline a tad. I don't know.. they just looked better to me than doing the whole flower that way. Ha! I know... strange...I don't get me either! LOL I then wanted to add more to my image but didn't simply want to put ribbon on it. I wanted it more... ohhhh... clean, if you will. So, I added some copper thread that I took and made little knots along the way. Just a bit more dimension than just adding the threading around my image. And.. for added notice ability (is that a word???) of this thread... I wrapped it around my base for my focal image more than once... more than twice.. more than three times. I wanted you to be able to actually see that I had a bit of copper there. When I think of sunflowers, I think of rustic. Every time I've seen one in real life... they somehow seem a bit withered, browned and maybe even old. So I wanted to use the Gina K Pure Luxury Kraft paper under it. Just makes me feel... "homey". I must say.. one thing I REALLY loved about having both flowers sets, especially on a sunflower... all the SEED dots really show up if you use two different ink colors. I grabbed my dark brown Copic and was all ready to dab in some seed dots when I realized... "wow.. I don't have to do that now!" Cool, huh? I hope you have a great weekend and that you see more sunshine than snow (what we are tired of). Suppose to be a heat wave for us... mid 30's I believe so I'm hoping to get even more Spring inspired! Have a great day! *smile*