Sweet Sisters

I made this card for my big sister's birthday as the sweet 'Lili of the Valley' image so reminded me of us as little girls. We don't see enough of each other now, living on opposite sides of the world, so I wanted to remind her of those 'together days' of times gone by. The backing paper is a lovely butterfly and flowers 6x6 paper from the Rita Marie paper pack by 'Stamps & Memories'. I bought this at the Alexandra Palace 'Big Stamp & Scrapbooking Show' last year. I used my 'Sizzex Big Shot' to die cut the image and the image mat. I used Square Parenthesis from the 'Xcut Nesting Dies' range. The lovely mulberry paper flowers are from 'Wild Orchid Crafts'. The central flower is a Small Gardenia and the two smaller flowers are 25mm Tea Roses. I didn't want to use leaves as I wanted to keep the flower section quite 'light', so curled the left over flower stems and popped those in among the flowers. I've not been using these sort of flowers very long, so it's all a bit of a learning curve as to placement and finish. But I get a lot of inspiration from the fabulous cards made by my favourite paper crafter - Bev Rochester. The pretty blue seam binding ribbon is also from 'Wild Orchid Crafts'. I created a pink mat for the ribbon using the shimmery pearlescent 'Gemstones' card stock from 'Core'dinations' backing this with some plain blue paper I had in my craft stash. I used 'Xcut' border punch 'flowers' to create the decorative edge and also created the top left decorative corner using the same punch. To the other three corners I added some offcut swirls from the waste created by the border punch. Finally, the sentiments were created using 'Whimsy Stamps' Mini Ticket Die and the coordinating Mini Ticket Sentiment stamp set. Now that's said, I must get this in the post to my big sis!

I have entered my first ever card competition with this card - the Lili of the Valley - National Craft Month Competition: Pink or Mum. This is entered under the 'Pink' category, so hope they think it's pink enough!