If you don’t know this…I’m not much of a winter person after Christmas and New Year’s day.  I’d probably be willing to jump from January 1st right to April 1st if it were up to me.  So it’ll come as no surprise to you that I’m thinking SPRING already. I have a whole bunch of Spring paper in my stash and I started to wonder what I could make that would show it off… so I decided on a SAMPLER.  Kind of like cross stitch only with paper and paper crafting supplies.  I thought I’d even put it in a frame and just see how much paper, crafting supplies and paper craft items I could work into that frame. OH BOY!

Do you remember the paper flowers I made back in November with the i-top brad maker? Well, all this time they’ve been laying around waiting for a home…waiting for me to make something to embellish with them.  Give them a purpose. Well, it took a little while but I did it!  They were the perfect thing to add to my sampler.

I started off with the Printing Press Cricut Cartridge, a deep cut blade and a white picture frame that is 12 inches by 36 inches.

Using a thin chipboard I cut out the word SPRING.  I cut a letter in chipboard first and then loaded scrapbooking paper in the machine and cut the exact same letter out on cardstock.  I mixed up the letter types too using bold, shadow etc so that each letter is a bit different. The reason I cut both the chipboard and cardstock letters one by one is so that I didn’t have to go back and remember which setting I cut the letter out with.  I know my limitations people! 🙂

I taped the cardstock onto the chipboard.  It’s a little tricky to get it to line up just right but not too difficult!

I then used embroidery floss (DMC) to embroider Bazzill Basics Stitchz’ paper in Limeade.

Tape your beginning and ending threads down so they won’t show through or come undone.

Three flowers on two pieces of cardstock…one for each end of the frame.

Then I used a VersaMark Water Mark Stamp Pad to stamp a flowe image all over the three cardstocks I used in the background.

Sticky strips to attach the letters. I didn’t want to tape them flat to the background.

I ended up using a DOUBLE layer of sticky squares to attach the flowers so they would stick out further than the letters.

Look how fun! I used three different card stocks in the background.  Green (with the stitched flowers), yellow and blue.  I cut them in big circles and swoops and it ended up looking (to me) like the sun coming up in a blue spring sky with green hills on each side.  Yeah, I know, I have a crazy imagination!

I let the paper flowers come out of the sampler and over the frame a bit.

Can’t help myself.  I’m loving this! And that Printing Press cartridge is one of my absolute favorites!!

A side view.  I put the glass from the frame in a safe place.  I’ll have to see if I can find another use for it… or when this paper starts to not look so good I can use the frame for something else and I might need the glass then.  Who knows! What do you think?  Looking at it now I am thinking of a thing or two that I might add to it but I don’t know.  What would you add, if anything?