Whimsy Stamps ~ Himalayan Poppy

Hey lovely friends, this week has kinda crushed me, it's just been one thing after another. My mummy is out of hospital and doing great now, but was a busy and stressful week. July 15th marked the passing of 20 years since my beautiful daddy died and it was nice to gather and refuel the soul on Saturday with my mummy and siblings. We were only missing two of the seven siblings, my baby sis who lives in America and another sis who was too poorly to attend. I definitely needed some 'topping up' after the week we'd had. There are more stresses ahead, so I'm grabbing this opportunity to catch up some posts while I can. I made this lovely card earlier in the month, but just haven't had time to blog it. I've shared it tonight as part of our showcase post for the Divas on our Whimsy Inspiration Blog.

This beautiful creation uses a really pretty stamp called Himalayan Poppy from the DoveArt Studios line at Whimsy Stamps. I adore the realistic serene scenes and nature inspired images of this line. I've wanted to buy and colour this image for quite some time and finally bought the image and was so happy to colour it up. I didn't mean to colour it almost identically to the cover art, but I'd loved the blues they'd used and just pulled out a bunch of my blues and kinda just went for it. When I'd finished, I pulled out the stamp cover and went 'oh snap!', how funny is that?! But I LOVE the way it looks and I tried a couple of paper backs before deciding this very muted palette was actually perfect for this image to really shine.

The pretty paper above is the reverse side of this lovely fawn striped paper. I originally planned to use this as it's so pretty and had some complimentary hues, but it was just too busy to really let the image shine, so I'll use that another day, as there are two in each pack. This time around, the plainer side was definitely the right choice, but seriously, how pretty is this floral paper above?!!

The 'hello' sentiment is from one of the free sets that was offered in the Whimsy Stamps retreat, which I foiled in gold to add a little sparkle and glitz. It's only tiny, but again, I didn't want to detract from the image, so kept it simple. I loved the rustic touch the strip of hessian added behind the image too. I toyed with the idea of using a doily behind the image, which you can see below.

I did really love how this looked, but in the end, the simplicity of the simple back, really let the image shine, so I finished the design like this.

Thanks for popping by today. I hope you enjoyed seeing my Himalayan Poppy in it's different designs. I love this image so much, I'm keen to try it in reds or pinks next! I'll have to research the different shades poppies come in.

We've had a busy month at Whimsy and I can't believe we're heading to the end of July so fast! We've swapped the final showcase and tutorial weeks, so I'll be sharing a tutorial next week by one of our lovely Divas Lisabeth, if you've not seen her colour, you really need to check this out! I'll be back again very soon with another creation I've been hanging out to share. So see you again soon. Hugs, Wends xoxo