Christmas anemones - Anemones de noël

The holidays for me are a lot about flowers; bunches of tulips, poinsettias, wreaths of greenery, hyacinths. Whites and greens in my house, clean and lovely and doesn't look old even into the new year. But I love anemones and I love them in color as well as in all the white shades, the blues and purples and even the odd red one.

When I originally bought the Beautiful day stamp set from Altenew I knew very well that the flowers were peonies, (which I also love) but I got that particular set because the main flower looks like an anemone to me.

This year some of my Christmas cards will have watercolored anemones in all possible colors as I was so inspired after taking an Altenew Academy class called Polychromatic taught my Nina-Marie Trappani. Nina demonstrates several coloring media in the classes, she does beautiful work.
I choose to work with my Arteza watercolor brush markers on Bristol smooth cardstock.

After stamping out several anemones in Versamark Onyx black ink and heat embossing in clear power I colored a whole evening, doing the class home work for my AECP certification. I think my flowers got better with each one, practice makes perfect so I'll just keep practicing!

Since it's definitely too boring to make the exact same card 6 times, after I diecut the flowers I pulled everything together into a set of 6 Christmas cards, using a lot of white space and aiming for a CAS look. Each card a little different but they are definitely a set.

Here they are:


This first purple one has a sprig of leaves from the Build-a-flower Rose set stamped in all the colors from the Sea Shore Crisp Inks collection; Mountain Mist, Volcano Lake, Lagoon and Emerald. Then I diecut a frame from  Concord and 9th Love set in a gorgeous bright green, mirror Mirri paper from the Paper Cut.

The sentiment which is the same on all these cards is from the little Pine Tree set, this one I stamped in Midnight Violet Crisp Ink and then overstamped in Versamark to be able to heat emboss and make the color shine a bit - there was a lot of shine in the paper that needed to be compensated for.


My second anemone was white, painted with a grey toned Arteza marker, I love how it came out! My mother would have loved this one.

The background was the inside from the previous diecut, and the leaves also as above. I added three small drops of Nuvo Crystal Drops in Simply White and heat embossed the sentiment in black.


The red anemone I felt looked the least real of all of them, it seems red is a somewhat unnatural color so that's why I simply diecut the leaves from a glossy dark green cardstock from my stash and monted on to a strip of the lovely (real!) wood paper from Altenew.


I do like the contemporary look of this one!


Next I decided to mount the beautiful pale pink bloom together with the Leafy Wreath Die from Altenew. I diecut the wreath in both glitter and metallic gold washi tape from the Metallics stack from DCWV.

Without the sentiment this could be bridal card.


Here is another white anemone, this one has a blue tint to it, for some reason it looks grey in this photo, not sure why??? 

Does it look more blue here, not even sure?
Again I went with the solid leaf cut out from the same metallic gold washi, I added Frosty Pink ink through a small hear stencil from Melissa Frances and heat embossed the sentiment in gold.


For the blue anemone I matched it with copper glitter washi to follow that hot trend, pretty combination, no? I glued it on to the lovely Spicy Yogurt cardstock from Altenew because I thought white cardstock was too harsh.

The sentiment was heat embossed with copper embossing powder that I purchased surely before the year 2000 - good heavens, should I even tell you that?



That's all the cards for today, what do you think, do you have a favorite?

Comments

  1. Helen, you are on a roll! These cards are so beautifully colored and I am pleased that you made a set of gorgeous cards with variations. I am so glad that you are so inspired! Thanks so much for entering your beautiful work in Altenew AECP assignment Gallery. Beautiful colors and design. Well done!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Virginia, I do love to make sets :)

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