Petit Jardin Flourishes with Joanne

Golden Flourish Card
featuring Couture Creations Le Petit Jardin Collection

For this card I've used some gold card stock and two of the papers from the Le Petit Jardin 12 x 12 pad, along with the Midday Corner Decorative die and the Jardin Doily Mini die to create the background.

For the topper, I was undecided which way to make it, so I've made several versions. In the photo above, I've used the Frame from the Ooh La La Framed Owl set, and the With Love sentiment hot foil stamp from Couture Creations Anna Griffin collection, but I also had lots of other ideas for the topper - shown below.

As you can see it works well with plain nested ovals, with the oval frame or other layering die sets as a frame; and the sentiment can be foiled, die cut or heat embossed using gold embossing powder, using whatever you have.

I've made an A5 size card (21cm x 14.9cm) so start by cutting a piece of gold card to 20.6cm by 14.5cm (4mm smaller than A5).

Die cut 2 of the Midday Corner from gold card.

Cut a piece of the dark purple paper to 20.2cm x 14.1cm (8mm smaller than A5) and a strip of the floral paper 9.5cm wide.

Lay out the corners on the purple paper in the top right and bottom left corners - but don't stick them down yet.

Position the strip of floral paper diagonally across the backing paper, between the corners, and use some low tack masking tape or repositional tape to hold it in place on both of the long edges as shown below.

Then the corners can be taken off, and the papers turned over so that some of the excess can be trimmed away from the corners - but don't trim away all of the excess at this stage.

Turn the papers back over so that you can see the front and release one of the pieces of tape holding the diagonal strip in place.

Fold the strip back (hinged by the remaining piece of tape) and add double sided tape (or glue if you prefer) to the back. Remember that you still need to trim off some of the excess at the corners, so don't go right up to those edges.

Lay the strip back down across the purple backing paper, and stick it in place. The second piece of masking tape can now be removed.

Turn the papers over to the back again and trim the excess off the diagonal strip, flush with the edge of the purple backing paper.

Layer the papers onto the gold card and stick down on your card blank, and then stick the corner die cuts in place.

Cut 2 of the Jardin Doily mini die and trim so that they have a square corner. Stick these in place in the corner of the diagonal strip.

Create the topper using the purple paper as the background with either a sentiment cut from the same gold card as the corners, stamped and embossed with gold embossing powder, or foiled. Cut out and add to the decorative frame, or just layer up some plain ovals cut from gold card and more or the purple paper.