An Everlasting Pot of Flowers

handmade by
~ Cobwebs ~
at
The Cobweborium Emporium

I wanted to make something special, something with a bit of a ‘wow’ factor for an older friend who lives on the opposite side of the planet to where I am.  It had to be big enough to be worthwhile making and receiving.  But it had to be light enough so as not to cost such a huge amount for postage  that I had to take out a second mortgage to pay for it!   So I came up with the idea of a pot of flowers.  However, it has a surprise twist to it. More about that ‘twist’ in a minute….

It took me lots of measuring and throwing sheet after sheet of copy paper into the bin (after using it to try out the measurements and see if they were right), before I found the correct measurements to make a card which was big enough to look like a plant pot containing flowers.  Then I made the scalloped edge to the pot in order to give it another dimension. (You can just see the scalloped edge peeping out from below the flowers)

Then I made a stand for the back out of chipboard card,  (so that the whole thing stood up just like a plant pot)  and then blended some dark ink around the edges of the card to make it appear more rounded in shape – rather than the flat card it actually was.

Next came the flowers.  The majority of the flowers are all handmade by me.   However there are a handful of the smaller ready make paper/silk effect like flowers which kind of add an extra dimension and make it look more real in a funny sort of way.

….  and this is where the ‘twist’ comes in …

The card you’re looking at  isn’t  a single piece of card type card.  This is a pocket card.  The pot is sealed around three sides – and the top is left unsealed so that it makes a pocket, into which was going to be a tag.

So … now comes the tag part.  I inserted the tag into the card so that I could work out how far down the tag I needed to put the flowers so that the tag couldn’t be distinguished from the card when it was in place and vice versa. But I didn’t want the brown of the card tag to show, so the flowers had to be in *just* the right place.

handmade by
~ Cobwebs ~
at
The Cobweborium Emporium

When the tag is pulled from the pot of flowers I made sure that the pot was still pretty so was careful about where and how I placed the flowers.  But the flowers you’re looking at aren’t the whole story.  You see … I wanted the card to be just as pretty on the back as it was on the front … so the flowers go around the back of both the pot and the tag.

The tag was where I wrote my message to my friend and signed my name.  I boxed the card and sent it via Royal Mail.  The card arrived exactly one week later – and she was absolutely thrilled with it.

Oh heck .. I nearly forgot  … the metal oxidised ‘copper’ label holder on the bottom of the tag actually isn’t metal at all.  I die cut the label holder from a Sizzix die,  then embossed it with copper embossing powder to which I’d added some green embossing powder in just the right colour … then I used the heat gun from below to melt the crystals, then once they’d melted, I swapped to heat from the top so that I could get a slightly bumpy, raised sort of look to it in a few places, so that it looked like it might be getting that kind of flaky thing going on.  I then attached it to the card with glue, and used two copper brads (with the legs cut off) which I glued to either side of the label holder to make it look like it was screwed in place.

Hope you like it.  Let me know by leaving a comment – I love your thoughts!

Have a fabulous Monday,  from  . . . .

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