Christmas Flower - October Stamp of the Month Blog Hop

Hello and welcome to the October stamp of the month blog hop!  If you have arrived here from Sarita Schraeder's blog, or if you are just starting out, you are in the right place!  When you are done here, you'll hop along over to Lalia Harris' blog and check out what she made or us this month.

Very Merry Christmas, this month's stamp of the month, is a set of 11 fun stamps perfect for Christmas crafting.  There are images for tags, cards, ornaments, etc. and most of them coordinate with our Artiste Cricut cartridge. (Or you can of course cut things out by hand if you don't have the cartridge yet.)

I decided to think a little out of the box this month and use one of the stamps a little differently than it was intended:

Using very simple assembly, I used the ornament stamp and coordinating Cricut cut to make a poinsettia type flower.  Each ornament shape was scored in the middle and folded up, then the sides rolled back.  Then I simply inserted a Shimmer Designer brad through the hole of the first 5 ornament shapes, layering them around in a circle.  Then I added the next 5 ornament shapes underneath, moving them so their tips peeked out from between two "petals" on the top layer, and bent over the prongs of the brad.  Finally, I used Glue Dots to adhere the green "leaf" ornament shapes out away from the center so they would show from behind the rest of the flower. You can see the shaping of all of the pieces better in this photo:

For a finishing touch, I used Glitz glitter gel in green and pink in various spots.  This is a beautiful oversized piece, and would be great for a beautiful package topper, an ornament, part of table decor, and more.  I chose to use mine as a topper for the small grapevine tree in my kitchen. An easy way to do this is make a cardstock cone large enough to fit over the tree, then attach the flower to the cone using 3-D Foam Tape:

Finally, a quick word about the colors I chose for this.  To make things easy, I stuck to one color family, Adventure:

So that I could stamp in red and green and have it show up with nice contrast, I chose to use Hollyhock and Pear cardstock for my Cricut shapes and stamped in Cranberry and Topiary.

Here's a list of everything I used to make this project:

• Cardstock in Pear and Hollyhock
• Exclusive Inks stamp pads in Topiary and Cranberry
• Very Merry Christmas, stamp of the month
• Cricut Artiste collection
• Shimmer Designer Brads (gold small)
• Glue Dots
• 3-D Foam Tape
• Glitz Glitter Gel in pink and green

I would love to hear your comments before you go!  Then head on over to Lalia Harris' blog for her (awesome, I'm sure!)project.