Hello crafty friends!
Today I’m sharing a floral card created with the beautiful Build-A-Garden: Harvest Bouquet from Altenew. I went for something a little moodier with this one, combining soft lilac blooms and blue-green foliage with a rich chocolate brown background. I love how dramatically those cooler colours pop against the darker cardstock.
The Harvest Bouquet has such a lovely illustrated feel to it, and the coordinating products make it really easy to take the design from a simple stamped image to something much more dimensional. I finished the card with the coordinating grateful die, a smaller “for all you do” sentiment and just a few gold details to tie everything together.
Why you’ll love the Build-A-Garden: Harvest Bouquet
If you love florals but want something that feels a little different from the usual roses and peonies, Build-A-Garden: Harvest Bouquet is definitely worth a look. The large bouquet stamp is filled with open flowers, buds and flowing foliage, giving you plenty of opportunities to experiment with different colour combinations.
The set includes the floral stamp, a five-piece coordinating layering stencil set, matching dies and a Mini Ink Blending Brush. The dies cut out the complete floral arrangement as well as the grateful sentiment and its shadow layer, making it particularly easy to create dimensional designs like this one. There are also eight sentiments covering friendship, gratitude and general appreciation, so it’s a really versatile set to have in your craft room.
And although Altenew describes this as part of its autumn collection, I don’t think you need to feel restricted to traditional autumn colours at all. Switching the palette to lilac, aqua and teal completely changes the feel of the bouquet while that deep brown background still gives the finished card a lovely seasonal richness.
Card Inspiration – Grateful For All You Do
For this card, I wanted the florals to frame the design rather than simply placing the complete bouquet in the centre. Breaking the arrangement up and allowing the flowers to travel around the edges creates so much movement, while still leaving enough open space for the sentiment to really stand out.
The touches of gold, from the splattered background to the sentiment and sequins, add just enough warmth against all those cooler floral colours.
- Cut a top-folding card base from dark chocolate brown cardstock, then cut a second panel slightly smaller than the card front.
- Add fine gold splatters across the smaller brown panel and allow these to dry before adhering the panel to the card base.
- Stamp the Harvest Bouquet floral image using a dark ink.
- Use the coordinating layering stencils to colour the bouquet, blending soft lilac and deeper purple tones through the flowers, aqua and teal through the foliage, and a warm golden yellow into the flower centres.
- Use the coordinating die to cut out the finished floral arrangement. Repeat the process if required so you have plenty of flowers and foliage to work with.
- Trim the die-cut bouquets into smaller sections and begin arranging them around the card. Concentrate the majority of the florals across the lower left and bottom of the card, then add a smaller section towards the upper right corner.
- Adhere the floral pieces using a combination of liquid adhesive and foam adhesive, allowing some sections to sit flat while others are raised for extra dimension.
- Die cut the grateful sentiment from metallic gold cardstock and cut the coordinating shadow layer from white cardstock. Adhere the two together.
- Stamp “for all you do” onto a small strip of light neutral cardstock using dark brown or black ink.
- Add a loose loop of natural twine behind the sentiments before adhering them across the lower floral arrangement.
- Finish the card with a scattering of gold sequins amongst the flowers and across the background.
I really love the contrast on this one. The brown background gives the card quite a dramatic look, but the lilac flowers and turquoise foliage keep everything feeling fresh rather than too heavy. It’s also a great example of how changing the colours can give a supposedly seasonal floral set a completely different personality.
Shop the supplies
If the Build-A-Garden: Harvest Bouquet has caught your eye, you can find it along with the other supplies I’ve used below. Shopping through my affiliate links costs you nothing extra, but it does help support my content and allows me to keep sharing more card-making inspiration with you.
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