Life is Sweet – A Garden Market of Smiles!

Hello Tea Timers! 

Michelle from the Design Team here and today’s card is blooming with happiness with a charming hippo! 

I had so much fun creating this bright, cheerful scene and hold onto your seats as I mixed a matched a record number of stamp sets that makes it plant-tastically special.

Stamp sets used:

• Hippo - Snappy Before Coffee
• Plants - Purrfect Day, Home Is Where The Heart Is, Seasons Tweeting
• Flowers and bee - I Really Dig You
• Bucket plant pot - Beach Buds
• Sentiment and cart - Sweet Cart Critters 

To start off, I stamped and coloured the images with alcohol markers and highlighted with a white gel pen. Once this part was done, I did some ‘plant cuttings’ by trimming off the trough part on the flowers and gluing it to the cart. The plants in the bucket style pots is a tree branch cut down to size and turned vertically. The eucalyptus like plant is 3 of the leafy fronds from the Seasons Tweetings stamp set grouped together.

For the dreamy sunset background, using a cloud stencil, I ink blended on pink, orange and yellow inks on a piece of white card stock. I then splattered gold metallic watercolour to give it interest. Once the sky was dry, I stamped the ‘Life is Sweet’ sentiment directly onto the background with black ink.

To create a rustic market feel, I knew I had to have a cobblestone ground. I took a piece of white card stock and die cut a hillside. I then used a patterned stencil and ink blended grey ink and splattered with black ink. 

Once I had all the pieces to the plant market stall, I laid it all out and like really life gardening, spent a quite some time deciding which plant should go where! When I was happy with everything, I glued it all down with liquid glue. I made sure I added a bee as wherever there are plants and flowers, there is always a busy bee!

To finish the card, I framed the scene using the Smile Inverted Scallop Frame, die cut from white card stock and adhered with foam tape to give it some height.

If you love this card as much as I do, don’t forget to let your creativity bloom!

Happy Crafting,

Michelle