Framed art – home decor using Altenew Peonies

Peonies – specially the stamp sets with peonies – are still on my mind. I have been (over-) using the altenew stamp sets – a beautiful day and peony bouquet a lot. Like seriously, A Lot!! And I have been wanting to use stamps to create something other than cards for quite some time now. So this time I used these two stamp sets to come up with a couple framed art pieces.

The flowers in both these stamp sets are good sized for making something like this. Each set also has some foliage stamps and some smaller vine like images which give the piece some added interest.

I used the two Altenew stamps for the main floral arrangements and Clearly Besotted – Happy Everything for sentiments. Used a lot of masking to position the foliage behind my flowers. You can read more about masking technique here.

Both these panels were slightly larger than a standard A2 card front. The first one measures 4×6 and the second one is 5×7. I used Canson watercolor paper for both, because initially I intended to do watercoloring on both of these. But as I started masking and stamping, I was having too much fun to ignore all the layering stamps :-)

For embellishments, I decided to add just a little bit and not have too much dimension because it would get squished when framing. I did add just a few tiny ones though, as the bling-crazy crafter in me could not resist. The first one got some flat backed colored rhinestones and some sequins. For the second one, I stamped the sentiment itself in some shimmery gold ink from Tsukineko Brilliance dew drop ink. I also added a couple heart sequins (from SSS February 2016 card kit) and some Crystal Reflection sequins (from SSS May 2016 card kit).

The first one got mounted directly on the black mat that came with the frame. For the second one, I added a patterned paper for the backing and cut it to size.

Here is what the actual art pieces look like: