Let it bloom inspiration challenge

I made this card for the Verve Stamps "let it bloom" Inspiration Challenge.  The inspiration photo is a gorgeous mason jar floral arrangement and as you can see I have made a very literal interpretation. The first step in this card was to stamp out the two of each of the different size flowers from the Verve Brighter Days stamp set onto some ranger mixed media cardstock in versamark and heat emboss with  Sparkle n Sprinkle white detail embossing powder and heat set. I then coloured the stamped flowers with kuretake gansai tambi watercolours (which I only just got this month for my birthday so this is the first time I have played with them).  I then fussy cut the flowers so that I only had the first two layers of each of the flowers - to make a larger bunch of smaller flowers if that makes sense. On another piece of the ranger cardstock I smooched around some watercolours in the area where the flowers were to go so that the white cardstock would not be seen behind. I cut some leaves out of the ranger card with the Joy crafts vintage flourishes die 6003/0026 and some strips to act as stems and again watercoloured them in the soft blue and green. 

I cut the jar from the Lawn Fawn summertime charm die out off vellum and shaded it with some BG copic markers. I then (and this was my first boo boo) stuck the stems behind the jar and then tied the bakers twine around the top of the jar. I then went to emboss the sentiment from the same verve set onto of the jar - which now had a very uneven surface.  I only had the tiniest bit of the twine in the turquoise colour so if I had cut it off I would have had to change the colour also I had used super tape and it didn't want to come off anyway. So I just stamped and embossed with the gold trying to push down enough over the stems behind to get even coverage. I almost succeeded but not quite.  I then adhered down the jar, leaves and flowers with silicon to get some dimension.

Boo Boo number two - I decided that the white background was boring and needed something so I decided that some ink splashes might be nice. But with everything adhered down I had to tear up some paper to create a mask so I wouldn't get ink all over the floral arrangement. Finally I stuck down some iridescent pink sequins and stuck the panel on a pearlised card base and called it finished.

So the things I learnt in making this card
1.  You get much better stamping results if you stamp on a flat surface
2.  Finish your background before you put on your main elements
3. (another one I hadn't mentioned yet is) When you create the perfect arrangement of your elements - take a photo before you pull it apart to adhere it all down - frustratingly I forgot.
Anyway here is my card and the inspiration photo from Verve.