KOLA Designs

Welcome to our August ARTISTE Blog Hop! Each month we will showcase a feature of the amazing ARTISTE Cricut cartridge which can be purchased exclusively through a Close to My Heart Independent Consultant.

We’re so excited to be doing this hop and we have a fabulous lineup with some very talented ladies. There will be lots of fun projects!!!

This month we will be showcasing a different page from the Artiste cartridge! Did you know there were 700 images on this cartridge?? That’s right — 700!!!

If you just happened to come to this blog, you should start at the beginning at Lucy’s blog – http://www.love2createitall.com.

Onto My project!! – {Artiste Flower Bouquet}

Well, you all know that I absolutely LOVE the flowers we can create with our Art Philosophy cartridge, right?? Imagine how excited I was to see 4 NEW flowers to cut on Artiste!! The flowers are all on page 54, along with some great leaves to coordinate. For today’s project, I decided to use the flower found under {“f” ->; “shift” ->; “accent 2″}. It’s the purple flower in your handbook 🙂

To start, I cut out about two dozen flowers in various sizes ( 2″ – 3.5”) from two papers in the Scholastic collection. I distressed half using our new Saddle ink and the other half using our new Ruby ink (two great new additions to our colour palette!)

Here is a handful of the flowers after distressing

Time to make them into flowers!! A quilling tool makes things go quick and easy for this – just start with the outside edge, slide it in the slot, and start curling! The tighter you curl, the smaller and tighter your flower will be.

Time to make stems!! I came up with a cool technique to colour your stems while doing this project using alcohol re-inker, a plastic baggie, and skewers. Add the skewers to the bag, add some re-inker, seal it up and roll with it! Just lay it on the table and roll the sticks back and forth until they’re covered with ink – I wanted more coverage and added a bit more ink to my bag a couple times.

Here’s another tip for attaching your stems. Punch a hole about the same size as your skewer into the base of each flower so that there is a little spot for it to slide into when you glue it in place.

I glued my flowers together, then added the stem while the glue was still hot, and added a bit more glue on the bottom for some stability.

Next, I cut some leaves from page 54 {accent 4} around .75″. I also punched holes in the leaves so that they could slide right onto the stems.

After going through about 4 different options for vases, I finally chose this glass square vase. I had a block of styrofoam and surrounded it by floral grass.

I finished it off by using some frosted vinyl and some designs from Artiste {page 75 and page 60) to give it the etched glass look.

The next stop on your blog hop fun is Jennifer’s Blog!!

Here is the list of all the talented consultants who are participating in this months blog hop:

1. Lucy ~ http://www.love2createitall.com
2. Darla ~ http://www.stampingunderdoctorsorders.blogspot.com
3. Julia http://youcancreatectmh.blogspot.com/
4. Theo www.celebratecrafts.com
5. Tina Gale http://tiggersscrapplace.blogspot.com
6. Stephanie http://www.quiltedscrapper.blogspot.com
7. Mandy http://www.mandydesigns.blogspot.com
8. Joanne http://josiesjoy.blogspot.com
9. Laura W http://scrappinsweetiesescape.blogspot.com/
10. Rebecca ~ http://blog.scrapprincess.com/
11. Maria Woodworth – http://mariawoodworth.blogspot.com
12. Judith Ashmore– www.grammiejudys.blogspot.com
13. Lisa Woodward~http://mycraftyspaces.blogspot.com
14. Laura Charko – https://koladesigns.wordpress.com/
15. Jennifer Kramer– http://4heartsscrapbooking.blogspot.com/
16. Eva Friesen~ http://loveofcreating.blogspot.com

Thanks so much for stopping by!!!