March Blossom Punch PCL Design Team Projects - Part 1

Today's Lesson From The Craft Room:  One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.  - Helen Keller

I was working on my next set of Paper Crafter's Library design team projects the other day and decided I might want to incorporate some quotes into the project.  So I started searching for quotes by women and came across a few that really spoke to me.  This quote from Helen Keller was one of them.  This quote can serve as a mantra for life in general and, I believe, it can serve as a guide for us when it comes to our art making.  How often do you hold yourself back when you feel the impulse to just go nuts with your art?!  Do you hold yourself back because you might make a mistake?  or someone else won't like what you do?  or you don't want to "waste" your favorite paint, ink, paper, whatever?  The risk we accept by not expressing ourselves in the way we want in our art is far greater than the risk involved in wasting a bit of paint or making a boo-boo.  Today, give up creeping with your art - go wherever your impulse wants to take you - follow your impulse to soar!!!!!!
Today I am sharing with you two of the projects I created this month as a Design Team member for Paper Crafter's Library.  For today's projects I focused on using the Blossom Punch.  If you followed my blog last week, you saw the video on how to create flowers using your Blossom Punch.  Here, I used a similar technique to create flowers out of kraft colored tissue paper.  It is a lot easier to punch through tissue paper with your punch if you fold the tissue paper over a few times before punching.  Each layer of the flower was glued in the center to the one on top of it and then I scrunched the flowers and hot glued them to the branches.  The vase was filled with floral foam and covered with strips of First Edition Specialty designer series paper to hide the foam :)  I also used a piece of this designer paper to wrap around the outside of the vase - I adhered it to itself so that I can choose to slide the paper off of the vase if I want to decorate it differently.  Do you see the little bird in the branches?  I die cut some muslin using the Elegant Bird die and then sewed the parts together to create a small stuffed bird that I then hot glued to a branch.

For my second project I created a card to demonstrate how you can paper piece using your Blossom Punch.  Here I punched out a blossom punch flower from a variety of different papers and some silver glimmer paper (love it!).  I then cut the flowers up into smaller pieces and glued the pieces onto a base flower.  I added a greeting from the Elementary Elegance Sale-a-bration stamp set as well as a few extra embellishments.  I hope you've enjoyed these first two projects.  Join me tomorrow to see the second two projects I created! :)  You can learn more about Paper Crafter's Library here!