Flowering Beauties

Hey all! Welcome back. It's been a minute but I'm back too! Today, I am excited to show you these gorgeous peek-a-boo card with acetate and featuring The Greeting Farm and Altenew. I had gotten these Greeting Farm Fairy Beans a while back and I used some spare whisper white paper that I was cutting on my scan and cut and added some 'beans' and just cut them out too. I had no idea what to do with them. I started by coloring them all monochromatic. I left them on my desk for about a week and just stared at them. I thought they were super cute. I added some Wink of Stella for a bit of glitter.

Ugh. I'm obsessed. They are so stinkin' cute! With something like this I knew I wanted to create a set of cards, and I also knew I wanted to make these be a focus without too much going on. I have no idea what the inspiration was, but I ALSO received my order of Altenew floral stamps and dies and I wondered if they would work with these images. I wasn't sure as the beans are cutesie and the florals were more realistic. I decided to go for it. I knew I wanted the beans to peek through the flowers almost like a fairy in a forest would. I thought it would be best to use acetate as a front page of the card, layer the flowers on that and have the beans on their on mini card inside.
I originally wanted to make the flowers look like a bunch with just the eyes peeking through.
It was bad. So bad my husband came up and said 'ya, don't do that."
I decided to put the flowers in the corners and create a modest frame on the ends, and it worked out so much better.

I used some old swirl stamp sets from Inkadinkado to create a color matching background. I really wanted to keep the card base simple so the design stood out.
I really wanted to post each card to showcase the monochromatic feel as well as the variety of florals for each of them. I finished each of the cards off with a bit of Recollections Glitter Paper in small strips and accented the card with those, and of course a bit of wink of stella. Each card has that acetate front where I adhered the florals on. The only thing was, I created blank die cuts of each of the flowers and leaves to glue on the other side of the acetate to hide the glue. Unfortunately, it did bulk the card up a bit. I don't know what I would do differently. I wound up pasting a lot of small pieces for each leaf and each flower but if there was a way to create an aesthetically pleasing shape to glue on the back and hide the adhesive instead, I would love to figure that out.
I also topped off each card with some small embellishments, either pearls or rhinestones and just dotted them around sporadically.
I especially loved doing these on the blue fairy and added a rhinestone on the center of her flower which disappears once you open that first layer up.
I started with the yellow fairy first, and grabbed my Crazy About You (retired) Stampin' Up! set. I was able to create sentiments that worked for simple thinking about you cards. The outside was purposely left without a sentiment to keep focus on the image.
None of the sentiments are specific so these really are all occasion cards. And I stamped the sentiments into an ink color just a shade darker than the swirls to keep with the monochromatic theme.


The front of the card opens up normally and then the smaller card inside, measures 4x2.75 and opens in the opposite direction like a joy-fold card.

Here's a quick peek of the green fairy to show you how the first layer opens up and creates this beautiful diorama type of image, and then the next photo shows just the fairy and how simple and elegant the tiny card is.

I know it's kind of a longer post, but I really wanted to show each of the cards and just how pretty they turned out. I really hope it inspired you and have yourself an amazing night!

~Brandie~