Blousy Autumn Flower

Hello Everyone! and welcome to a long overdue flower tutorial!

I have been wanting to play with Eileen Hull's flower dies for some time now 

and had a chance this week to sit and play.

I love a good blousy flower ! 

It makes such a wonderful centrepiece on a small hanging, book cover or card. 

I have used three of Eileen's die sets to make this project:

Here are a few more close ups before sharing how I made the flower:

So .... for the blousy flower:

You need four of the largest flowers from Flowers, Heart and Soul and four of the blunt spiked centres from the Thinlets set. I used a good quality cream cardstock.

I used Rusty Hinge and Aged Mahogany Distress Inks (on both sides) as I wanted the colours to bleed together during the next stages.

Gather all the pieces together with a brad.

Make sure you have plenty of water in your spritzer bottle and give everything a good spray. I like to use a muslin nappy for this so the flower is not sitting in a puddle of water on the craft sheet. With a pokey tool very carefully lift the first layer up into the centre around the brad and give the leaves a bit of a "squish".

Continue to spray and lift each of the layers separately until they are all standing up around the brad. You can see how the colours are already blending and look quite different to the originals.

Then start doing the same for the outer layers (spritzing and lifting) however, be gentle as by this time the paper is quite sodden and you don't want to break the thinner part of the leaves.

Finally it should look like this!

The next stage is to open everything up again - one petal at a time - curling the petal around the pokey tool.

Make sure you don't lose any of the wonderful folds and creases. Just curl them as they are!

Do this until you complete the outer layers.

Fabulous depth from four layers!

Finally use the pokey tool to rearrange the smaller leaves in the centre. You can expose the brad if you like and glue in a pearl or make the brad a feature.

Leave the flower overnight if possible to dry naturally - it becomes quite crisp and hard and capable then of even being on a book cover.

To make these smaller flowers I have just used the four inner set of petals and sprtized and layered them around the brad and then left them to dry.

For the leaves I have again used the Flowers, Heart and Soul die and cut the small three leaf petal.

I have used the same cream cardstock and Distress Inks.

Spritz liberally with water and use the end of an old paint brush to start the folding.

The paintbrush makes it alot easier to handle and get some good creases and folds.

Again leave to dry naturally, before unfolding carefully.

Before adding everything to the background I cut a sentiment  and leaves from the Thinlets set. These were also inked with the same Distress Inks. Once dry I heat embossed with clear powder.

I really do hope you have a go at making these blooms. Hopefully the photo step by step is clear but I also have a video on my Youtube channel for the technique but using slightly different dies. However, I really like the size of Eileen's dies as they make a good size flower without being too large and are not too small and fiddly to work with.

You might also like this post where I made similar flowers for a vase:

Blousy Summer Blooms