Birthday Wishes Brought To You By the Letter P

The color challenge this week at Pals Paper Arts is all about the letter P:  peach, pear, and poppy.

Lovely colors aren't they?  I was puttering around my garden today doing some weeding and assessing things.  Trying to figure out what did not survive the brutal winter we had.  So I had flowers on my mind when I sat down to make a card.  I used the Stamping 411 sketch for a layout.

I used the Greenhouse Garden stamp set because I wanted to do a bit of two-step stamping.  I thought that it would look nice if I stamped the flower in Peach Parfait first, then stamped the detail stamp with Poppy Parade.  I like how it came out.  Then the small flower is just stamped in Poppy Parade.  I had to stamp off twice to get the color light enough so that the detail stamp would show up.

And last but not least, I tried my hand at a little crinkly seam binding ribbon.  I keep seeing this all over blogland and I really liked it, but for some reason nobody wanted to give up the secret to creating the look.  I thought I had read somewhere about heating it up with a heat gun, but I tried that and it didn't do anything except blow the ribbon around my stamp room.  So then I tried wetting it first, then I put the heat gun on it, and all I achieved was a wet ribbon blowing around my stamp room.  So then I posted a question on Splitcoast and got an answer pretty quickly.  And it's so simple:  wet, scrunch, dry.  Apparently, most people let it dry overnight.  You can use the heat gun to speed things up, but the heat tends to flatten out some of the crinkles.  But as luck would have it I accidentally discovered a quick way to do it.

I already had the little piece of ribbon that I wet first, then dried with the heat gun.  I crinkled it up in a very tight ball then carefully unravelled it.  I got a very nice soft, but crinkly ribbon.  Then I cut another small piece off the spool and crinkled it up.  I didn't like the look at all.  The crinkles were sort of sharp looking and the ribbon itself didn't have the soft look of the first one I did.  So I wet it, dried it with the heat gun, then crinkled it into a tight ball again.  When I unravelled it, it was just the softer look I was going for.  I think wetting it first sort of softens up the fibers of the ribbon so that it crinkles better.

Please excuse my ribbon ramble, but I'm so happy I figured this out.  I'm sure everybody else out there has known about this for ages and is wondering why I'm so late to the party!  But thanks for stopping by!