Spring fever

It's spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you've got it, you want - oh, you don't quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so! ~Mark Twain

Spring is fab!  Out in the garden, things are blooming and adding lovely colours to everyday life.  As we only moved to this house at New Year, I didn't get the chance to put any bulbs in, but I was thrilled when green shoots started poking through the ground and was hoping that they would be daffodils, and they were!  The bright yellow colour is so cheerful and if I could just stop my 3 year old son beheading them and bringing them to me, the garden would be full of them!  Ah well, I'm sure he will grow out of it... and then my younger son will start lol

The challenge over at Crafty Cardmakers this week is to use mainly yellow and these 3 embellishments stitching, rhinestones and ribbon, so a springtime card was just the perfect idea to fit.  I used a Sweet Pea Stamp, Jennifer Nilsson's Daisy Flower Fairy which I coloured with a range of yellow and amber promarkers and gold star gelly roll pen to add sparkle to the wings of the fairy and the bee.  I added a couple of orange rhinestones as earrings and then I couldn't decide what to do with it.  I knew I had yellow cards and things, but I couldn't think what to do next.  After a bit of a head scratch, I remembered back to a conversation I had with Vix during our Promarkers in the Park session last week and recalled that she had mentioned about twisted easel cards.  I have never done one before, so I decided to have a play with some card and see if I could do it... then decided to go two steps further and turn it into a triple twisted easel card!  It wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be, but is soooo effective don't you think?

The three panels are backed with some backing paper I made myself using yellow card and my new favourite friend, my I-cling flower stamp, stamped and embossed with orange, then diecut with my trusty old friend, my deckled rectangle nestie.  The main image was trimmed with the second largest nestie and then matted to one of the bigger diecuts.  For the front panel I printed the sentiment 'Just for you' in orange using my printer, then embellished with paper flowers I had coloured to match and added some opaque amber rhinestones for the flower centres:

I then added some faux stitching around the images with a black sparkle gelly roll so the 'stitches' would be more subtle.

For the back panel, I used the Mark Twain quote shown at the top of this post (just in case you can't read it on the photo):

The foldy bits (god I'm technical) I covered the visible side of the fold with yellow gingham paper which I had printed off from a freebie site.  For the stops for each part, I used a large flower, adhered with a sticky pad and teased the petals up so that they provide a firm stop.  I embellished the main part of the card with some yellow ribbon from my stash and was thrilled to find it matched perfectly without my having to recolour it! Yay!

What's more, the whole card folds flat so it will go in an envelope, which is always handy in the case of a card ;-)

On that matter, I would like to enter this in the following challenges:

Quirky Crafts - Twisted Easel (Hope a triple twisted easel counts!)

Paper Sundaes - Spring Blossoms (I think it certainly has a few of those!)

Basic Grey Challenges - More than one fold (check! lol)

In A Sweet Pea Dream - Hello Spring (I'd say there is more than just an element of that!)

Sweet Pea Stampers - Pack a punch (ANOTHER Sweet Pea from me - anyone would think I was addicted lol)