Using up some stash..

I made a commitment at the beginning of the year, to use up some of my multitude of flowers. I am finally taking a proper stab at doing just that! Sometimes I feel like I could make a flower card every day for the rest of my life! That might be nice if they were the latest Prima flowers or some other type of drop dead, gorgeous blooms....but they most definitely are not!

Some are cute, a very teensy few are gorgeous, and the rest were bought when I was still working, so are a little tired and dated looking   This year, whenever I am bored but don't want to start a card, or maybe don't have time to start a card, I am going to try to just work on flowers...give them an updated look by combining them with some other elements.

In the meantime, I have picked out some of the prettier ones to do a few cards to give away to a friend.
They were originally paper flowers from the wedding department at Michaels and were part of that 90% off the last marked price sale I blogged about.  I liked the colours together, so thought they were a good starting point. I am making up a set of 6. I am using different bling on the centers to make them all slightly different. Well, truth be told, I am using different bling on each card as I am trying to use up the last bits of certain bling!! When you get down to 6 or 8 diamonds or pearls left on an acetate sleeve, it feels good to finally use them up!
The flowers have a sort of shimmery sheen to them...It looks quite nice with the shimmer of the silvery aqua flower outlines on the patterned paper.

This silver card will be mailed to my daughter in Monaco...I have started writing the letter in it already!

The gift pack of 6 are made with  aqua cards. I managed to use a few more of my stash of pre-folded card and envelope packs, raided my snippets bins for the DP, used up a variety of bling packages and used the new, pre cut wedding flowers...All in all, these were really quick cards to make. This particular friend likes notecards so the inside of the cards will be left blank and these lighter weight pre-folded cards work out fine for notecards.
Here is an aqua one from the set. This one has fairly small brown pearls from the bling. On the others I have  used clear diamond bling, aqua bling, brown pearls, white pearls and aqua pearls. I think these brown pearls are my fave.

As you can see, I have left these ones without a sentiment. They are more versatile that way and she can use them for whatever need arises! What do you think? Are they too plain?

I was also pleased with the using this particular patterned paper. It was left over from a scrapbook project from several years ago.I started with 4 and a half 12x12 sheets. Now there is only 3 and 3/4. Great that it worked out as I find 12x12 paper so rarely works for cards as the overall pattern is usually too big.

Recipe:
Card and base - from my stash (so old I can't remember where I got them. Either Michaels or Zellers
Design Paper - unknown...the only marking I can find is SB 7207...it does not have a strip on the bottom to identify it...just a sticker on the back
Flowers - from my stash, originally from Michael's wedding department
Bling - from my stash, originally Dollarama

I am taking this card over to the Pixies Crafty Workshop as I polished off a few snippets making this card.
I don't think it is fir to go into any challenges as I took the idea from Pinterest.
Off to finish up a few more!
.*** Update*** Just replaced the photos with slightly clearer, truer to IRL colours.