Flourishes and flowers

One of my favorite embellishments, lately, has been the flower-decked flourish. Here's how I make them.

First, stamp a flourish. You might even want to do this directly onto your card or layout - if your're brave enough!

You then can cut out the flourish - or not! - and add just a few flowers.

Or you can leave the flourish as it is, and fill in the white space with a lot of flowers, so that just a little bit of flourish shows through, as at right.

Below, left is a layout where I cut the flourish from a separate sheet of cardstock, and adhered it to the layout.

And below is another layout, where I stamped the flourish very lightly onto the layout, then filled the curve in with flowers.

You can use any kinds of flowers you like (well, except maybe real!) and add more embellishments too. On my Salt Lake City layout, I've used silk flowers. These are the ones that are sold on the plastic stems. You just pull them off the stems, and they're flat enough to use on a scrapbook page, or you can layer them as I did on the flowers that aren't on the flourish. I attached these flowers with little silver brads.

On my Father of the Bride layout, I have flowers made by three different scrapbook manufacturers. The fuschia flowers I use as centers on mny of the medium-sized flowers, as well as the other small flowers, are Primas I've had for years. The larger pink flowers are the Recollections line at Michael's. The green and white flowers are by Hero Arts. The collection I bought also comes with brown and green flowers. Those, along with touches of yellow and pink, were the perfect colors for this wedding. I bought them specifically for scrapbooking this wedding, but I've already done almost 20 other wedding pages, so my package hasnearly run out. I've added "leaves" to the white flowers by using a ribbon from the wedding (actually from a present my sweet stepdaughter gave me at the rehearsal).