Flowers for Mom

I was excited to finally use the Karen Burniston Flower Pot Pop Up die set that I purchased a while ago with the express intent of making our Mothers Day cards this year.

I had watched Karen Burniston's assembly tutorial video for this die more than half a dozen times so I felt pretty confident the pop up mechanism would come together fairly quickly. But as it turns out, I ended up spending way too much time going back and forth on the design elements of the card... what colors to use?...which patterned papers?...which flowers and leaves?....etc, etc... that I barely finished the cards in time.

I finally settled on my favorite pinks and decided to make cutting files to create my own version of a layered flower instead of using the daisy style layered flower dies that came included in the die set. Layered butterfly was cut from Cheery Lyn Designs Small Exotic Butterfly dies; and I used C.C. Designs Olive Branch, Stampin' Up Little Leaves Sizzlets, as well as the leaf branch included in the pop up die set to cut the leaves.

Here's the fun pop up flower pot inside the card.

 Difficult to see from the photos, but I layered a combination of glitter and pearlescent cardstocks on the flowers and butterfly for a touch of bling. Flatback pearls were used for the flower centers.

Although I suspect this pop up die mechanism was designed to be used in cards with a portrait orientation, I decided to change mine into a landscape oriented card at the last minute. I first assembled the flower pot and attached it to a doily I had cut on my Silhouette. I then made the mistake of  filling the pot with flowers and leaves before attaching the flower pot to the card base. Didn't realize until I finally secured the doily and pot to the card base that all my flowers were facing to the right of the card! So rather than removing the stems and recutting all the branches to rearrange the flowers, I decided to rotate the card to a landscape orientation.

  

 I tried to balance to awkward placement of flower pot by placing the sentiment boxes to the upper left and bottom right of the finished card.   

Here's a shot of the flower pot pop up from the top which show how the struts in the flower pot run perpendicular to each other. The funny thing is, although it was this feature that really attracted me into purchasing this pop up die, as you can see in the final card, I ended up using the only the struts that were parallel anyway. That's okay, I'm looking forward to spending more time playing with this die set and learning how to better use it to it to its full creative capacity.