My First Big Rose…

Thank you for dropping in today. I just poured a cup of coffee and hoping you will visit as I share with you, my latest “practice piece” creation.

Design artist, David Tutera, has introduced a series of large flower dies for Sizzix. As I watched a quick video showing the ease of creating these larger than life flowers, I found myself clicking on the Order button.

Since I love beautiful roses, it is logical for me to start my practice and collection pieces there.

There is a unique feature with these dies that allow you to cut 2 petals at once which creates a connecting short tab. For this flower, cut 4 sets of each size. Since this was to be a practice piece, no accent coloring would be added.

Selecting the type of paper was also easy. USArtQuest is only a few miles from here. I have a collected a stash of Indian Batik papers in various colors from there. For the flower, I selected an off white with a metallic gold thread. For the leaves and stamen, I used a soft green marbled.

Now for the fun. Lightly mist the petals with water. Using your hand, crinkle the petals to form life-like shapes. Use a heat-gun to “set” or dry that crinkliness in place. You can use a ball-stylist or your fingers to create additional character.

Use hot glue to attach each petal layer. My preference is to not overlap the same sized petals. Continue adding petals till you achieve the look you want. With the ball-stylist, cup the layers of stamen and glue into place.

This flower measures almost 8 ½” across and almost 3” in height.

Hope you will give these big flowers a try – they really are fun.

Till next time,

May God Bless You and Yours