How Does Your Garden Grow?

I've been wanting to try this technique since I saw Riet van Zundert's article in the April 2012 issue of Craft Stamper (although I can't see it on her blog).  Riet was inspired by this tutorial.  Here's my first attempt.

It all started with the Thinking of You stamp.  I wanted to make another card for the Hero Arts June contest, and as I've only got one Hero Arts Thinking of You stamp, I wanted to do something different with it, so I thought of cutting it and feeding sheer ribbon through the cuts, and thought this technique would be the perfect background.

Gather some petals and leaves from the garden.  Thick and juicy is not good, because basically you're squeezing the moisture out of the petals and leaves, and if they're too juicy, it will spurt out over your workstation.  I used scarlet geraniums, campanula petals (lilac), petunia petals (not recommended - way too juicy and almost ruined the pressing) and snapdragons (again, not recommended for the same reason). Oh, and various leaves, including flat leaf parsley!

I separated the geranium petals and cut the campanula bell so that I could flatten it out, then laid everything out on watercolour paper and sandwiched it with another piece of watercolour, and put it through the Cuttlebug.  I ended up with two sheets, shown her side by side.  You get a different effect on each sheet where petals and leaves have overlapped.  Carefully peel off the squashed petals and leaves, and rub off any stubborn bits with a soft brush or kitchen roll.  Leave the paper to dry.

The dark purple splodge on the left sheet is the petunia and you can see how all the juice squashed out to the edge of the paper.   The individual purple petals are the scarlet geraniums! The large bluey flower at the top is the campanula.  I've enhanced the picture so that you can see the detail, but in reality the colours aren't as vivid as they appear here, they're more delicate.

I used the bottom-right section for this card.  You can see the flat leaf parsley at the bottom. Good fun!  I'm going to try yellows next time.