hydrangea frame

I am SO excited to share this project with you!! Creating home decor pieces is something that gets my mojo going, and the way this frame turned out, is exactly the reason why I get so pumped!

A close up look at the sentiment (Garden Beauty). This frame measures 12x12 and holds a 5x7 photo. To be honest, I don’t remember where I picked this up. But its a basic MDF frame from a crafting store.

A view of the flowers on the left hand side. I did mask the bottom flower off before I stamped the upper flower.

And here is the reason for my excitement…JUMBO cling stamps from Stampendous!! Oh, you should see these (click HERE, seriously)!!! Jumbo Hydrangea Cling measures over 7” tall and over 5” at its widest. The butterfly is 2 1/4” by 2 3/4”.

I actually didn’t color the flowers in for a few days. I wanted the color to be soft and very subtle, almost a water color look. After pondering for a bit, I remembered Fantastix! They are ink blending stumps from Tsukineko. The package comes with bullet (rounded) and point (like a pencil) tips.

Wanting to give the hydrangeas a realistic look, I started using a blue ink. Tumbled Glass to be more specific.

Here is a look at the petals with the blue ink.

Then I moved onto purple, but a lighter purple. I grabbed Milled Lavendar ink.

The Fantastix are easy to use. Rub the end into your ink pad and pick up some color. The rub it onto the surface you want colored. I used a circular motion because it seemed to spread the ink out evenly. You can see on a couple of petals in the above photo, where I didn’t, and the strokes stand out.

For the centers, I grabbed a deeper purple ink, Dusty Concord.

I applied the ink the exact same way, but kept the deeper purple to the centers and the shadows.

For the leaves, I used Peeled Paint.

This Fantastix is the point tip. This tip makes it easier to get into small spaces. When coloring with the green, I applied more ink to places that I wanted to have an appearance of shadows.

Here is a look at the final image, all colored. It took about 24 hours to dry. I would spray this with a matte finishing spray, to help the ink stay put, permanently.

And for those of you thinking, great technique, but I would never make a frame, I tried the same thing out on cardstock. It worked fabulously!!!

Hope this inspires you to try this technique! thanks for stopping by!

Supplies: Stamps-Stampendous (Jumbo Hydrangea Cling, Garden Beauty, Sincere Sentiments), Ink-Ranger Distressing (Peeled Paint, Milled Lavender, Dusty Concord, Tumbled Glass), Stewart Superior Palette (Noir), Fantastix-Tsukineko