Do not adjust your sets!

What a strange title for a blog post I hear you all cry! Truth is, I have spent the last week in the fair city of Frankfurt attending the Creativeworld trade fair where I took some pictures of a project that I was creating on the Craft Emotions stand for whom I was demonstrating. My phone doesn't have the best camera I'm afraid so don't go rubbing your eyes because the chances are most of the photo's are slightly blurred!

Creativeworld is a visual smorgasbord bringing together the brightest and best crafting talent from all over Europe.It was a great opportunity to meet up with old friends and make a few new ones along the way. We packed away the Sizzix stand at around Midnight last night and flew home this morning.

While at the Craft Emotions stand I had the opportunity to work with some wicked products which compliment die cutting perfectly, the team will be in Birmingham at the Stiches show in about three weeks so if you're lucky enough to be about it will be worth your while to check out some of their unique and innovative products (click on the link to check out their website).

The die that I used is the Susan's Garden Poinsettia which is a Thinlits set comprising 7 dies which we have looked at before. I also used my trusty Susan's Garden tool kit which goes everywhere with me.

I love using mulberry or silk paper because it has such a lovely texture but it is hard to shape as one would with card. I was handed rolls of adhesive silk paper on my first day at the show and this is a great solution to my problem, it allowed me to attach it to medium weight card to make my flowers.Next I die cut all the elements to make my flower which is far fewer than need to make a poinsettia, I just wanted a generic 'pretty flower', I then delicately inked the inner part of the petals.

Next I used my tools to shape the individual petals using my tool kit and some techniques you can see by following this link.

After shaping the flower centre, again using my tools, I ponched a hole through the centre to receive the pearl flower stamen ( see the Craft Emotions website), before attaching the individual petals. When the glue was dry I inserted the stamen.

I die cut a pillow box from printed Kraft card (Craft Emotions again!) and cut a strip of pink paper which I scrunched and distressed with inks before lightly sanding. I then wrapped the strip around the box,

Craft Emotions do a fab range of wooden embellishments ( I'm trying to think of a cool way to use the boxes too!) I selected 3 and inked them as shown using silver gilt wax for the butterfly, the centre of which I decorated with adhesive pearls before attaching them behind the assembled flower.

Here is the finished box in all its 'out of focus' glory. I guess I'll never win any photography prizes?

Here are a couple of other cards created during the show. top left features the poinsettia with some added foliage courtesy of the new Spring Greenery Decorative Strip die by Tim Holtz. the card top left again features the poinsettia  but with pink ink replacing the green and finally, the complete poinsettia in all its glory.