Peacock Love

It has been two weeks since I blogged (is this sounding like a confession?! Life is so busy at the moment, especially with the garden, more of that in due course.

Here is another card I made using the lovely Chocolate Baroque Peacock Parade stamps.  

I wanted to use the trio of feathers design to make a simple, but elegant card. The card blank is a gold/beige colour and I embossed directly onto that using Ranger Queen's Gold EP, which is one of my all time favourities. I used the word love from the Artistic Expressions set, currently on sale and so worth getting I use this set so often! I added coloured and heart shaped pearls for highlights and some cream guipre butterflies for a little embellishments. These are cut from some ribbon I bought in the haberdashery department of Liberty in London. Unusually I had my OH and a friend with me, while we were waiting to be served we were observing the wrapping process for the person on front which was getting very elaborate. My OH then proceeded to do a good (quiet, thankfully) impersonation of the scene from Love Actually where Rowan Atkinson is wrapping a gift. Needless to say my friend and I were virtually helpless with laughter by the time we were served. Just looking at that ribbon brings that moment back to mind!

I have been busy in the garden, especially the veg patch where everything is growing fast at last including the weeds. 

 

This is some chard and pak choi for salads and cooking. As you can see there are weeds too, including the one in the middle that is an edible orach which has magenta splashed leaves. I planted it once deliberately and now can't get rid of it, but it is so pretty I hate pulling it up, so it often gets a reprieve!

 



My beloved plume poppies are back in leaf which means I am working on my leafy backgrounds again.

The foxgloves are giving a very welcome splash of brightness and already beginning to drop their fairy bonnets and in the evening the honeysuckle is giving the most heady scent that makes an evening visit to the garden quite intoxicating.

Midsummer is a great time to be enjoying our little patch  of heaven and the sun is out again today, so the weeding in the veg patch is calling me once more.

Elaine x

An Indian Pavillion

There are two new wonderful sets of peacock themed stamps from Chocolate Baroque, Peacock Parade and Tangled Peacock.

 

 

I have been working with Peacock Parade and it's been very enjoyable. Here is one of the designs I came up with.

I started with making my fiery sunset background, using my leafy background technique in a range of yellow, orange, pink and red Adirondack and Distress inks. I added hills (or maybe sand dunes) in Seedless Preserves Distress Ink using torn paper as a mask. I die cut my pavillion using a DoCrafts X cut die, adding the trellis with a Memory Box die mounted behind. I added some gold pearlescent paper in the dome, with detailing using the peacock border stamp from the Peacock Parade set embossed in gold detail powder on black. I embossed the peacock in the same way and added red gems onto the pavillion and peacock. I added the palm tree stamp from a Christmas set Peace on Earth, the birds are from the Landscape Edges set and the sentiment from the Butterfly Dreams set.

Do pop over to the DT blog, linked in my side bar, to see the great work of my DT team mates. There are some great creative ideas coming up.

Elaine