Die Cutting Essentials Issue 85

 Hi there! 

This months issue of Die Cutting Essentials comes with three flower dies, four sheets of coloured foam and fifty stamens so you can create some beautiful, realistic looking flowers. I have a video showing you how you can create these flowers, so just click here to watch it!

These flowers are so easy to create, in the magazine there is a helpful hints & tips section which shows you how you can shape the foam for a more realistic look. Once I had die cut my flowers from the foam, I blasted it with my heat tool. I will worn you to be very careful! Heat guns get hot and it will take a few moments for the foam to start shaping, so I would recommend using a pair of tweezers to hold the foam. 

I made two flowers using the red and creamy foam, for the red flower, I die cut the largest layer twice, I think this has given it a much fuller look which I prefer. Whereas the cream flower only has one of each layer and it is a lot more open. To make these a little more realistic, you could add some ink to the edges of the petals or to the centers. 

Getting the stamens through the centers of these flowers was a little more on the tricky side, but this is really down to the fact that I hadn't done it before! The stamens are double ended, so just fold them in half, this way you are using half as many to get that full look, meaning this bunch will last a while!. You could also add some colour to these using markers, inks or sprays. I pieced a hole through all the layers with my pokey tool, but it just wasn't big enough to get the folded stamens through, so I got a thicker tool and pulled the loops through to the back of the flower. When I had everything in place I bended the loops over to one side and used a strong glue to keep it in place. The hints & tips section in the magazine gives the option to use a hot glue gun, but I used the Hunkydory Premier Construction Glue  and it worked perfectly and stuck to my card really well. 

My YouTube video is more a tutorial on how to make these flowers, but I did put together an easy card to show you how you can add them to a project and the size. The card I made was a US A2 size card (4.25"x5.5") and I just about fitted two of these on there. I also used the green foam and die cut some foliage to complete the look. I used an embossing folder with white card for the background and a simple Hello sentiment to finish the card.

I enjoyed creating these flowers, but I question how often I would use them on my cards, only because the dimension it creates is crazy! (depending on your project, this could be what you want!) I would have to make a box envelope to get this through the post. I think I would try it again using paper and see if they came out the same. 

Buy the magazine now at Craftstash!

Die Cutting Essentials Issue 85 - https://tidd.ly/32MusIo