TUTORIAL: Spring Wall Art with SRM Stickers & Cosmo Cricket

Supplies:
Frame with 8x10 opening
Light Yellow Cardstock
Cream Cardstock
Green Cardstock
Blue-gray Cardstock
In Stitches - Material Girl (Cosmo Cricket)
Measuring Up - Material Girl (Cosmo Cricket)
Ready, Set, Chipboard - Material Girl (Cosmo Cricket)
Monthly Memories –May (SRM)
Monthly Memories – April (SRM)
Tiny Type Alphabet Stickers (Cosmo Cricket)
Alphabet stickers (October Afternoon)
Glittered Flowers (K & Company)
Just the Edge – Pink (Bazzill Basics Paper)
Paper Posies (Doodlebug)
Lime Vivid Ink (Clearsnap)
Stormy Blue Vivid Ink (Clearsnap)
Green Embroidery Floss
Permanent Adhesive
Glue Dots
Foam Tape

Tools:
Paper Trimmer
Needle
Cork Board or Mouse Pad
¾” circle punch


Instructions:
Cut In Stitches patterned paper to 8” x 10”.

Cut yellow cardstock to 7” x 9”.

Punch multiple ¾” circles from yellow cardstock.

To create background texture, adhere circles onto 7” x 9” piece of yellow cardstock allowing a number of them to hang over the edge. Trim circles that hang over.


Adhere 7” x 9” embellished yellow cardstock, centered onto In Stitches patterned paper.

Using the Measuring Up patterned paper, cut 3 strips, 7” x 2”.

Cut strips in a wavy pattern so they can be layered one on top of another to create your grass. Ink edges.

Adhere strips together placing dimensional adhesive between the top and middle strips.

Adhere these strips to the yellow cardstock along the bottom edge.



Adhere April and May stickers to cream cardstock. Trim cardstock around edges of sticker. Add a scalloped edge along the bottom of these April and May pieces with a Bazzill Just the Edge border strip. Trim to size.


Cut small raindrops from blue-grey cardstock. Ink edges.


From here, you can start building your phrase “April showers bring May Flowers” by adhering the April scalloped piece you created earlier using foam tape, then add alphabet stickers to spell “showers…”, then add your raindrops. Lastly, adhere May scalloped piece just above the midpoint of the art piece.


Use the Tiny Type stickers to spell out the word "bring" onto a scrap piece of cream cardstock. Adhere just above the "May" sticker.


Use the remaining space to build your field of flowers. You’ll notice I used a variety of textures and dimensions the flowers I chose. Some were from the Ready, Set, Chipboard Material Girl set, some from a pack of premade glittered/rhinestone flowers by K & Company and the fabric flowers were handmade fabric yo-yos with a hand-stitched button or brad added to the center.


Once you have the flowers adhered, you can cut thin strips of green cardstock for the stems. Adhere some behind or in front of each layer of the grass you created.


Embellish further with hand-cut leaves cut from green cardstock, then crumpled for dimension.


After all the fuss over the flowers at the bottom half of the art piece, I needed a way to give the top a little texture and dimension, so I used pulled-apart cotton balls as fluffy clouds and applied them with glue dots.

I personally can’t seem to call a project complete unless it has some sort of hand-stitched detail on it. Since this project all ready has so many details, I tried to keep my hand-stitching as simple as possible by using the same color thread as the stems and just adding simple stitches to a few of them. I love the subtle detail that it adds.


Frame your finished project in an 8x10 frame and display.


If you enjoyed this tutorial, you can find all of my free tutorial right here.

happy creating!
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if this tutorial looks familiar, that's because i originally designed it in 2010 for a feature on the Write.Click.Scrapbook blog. i'm reposting it on my personal blog in an attempt to keep all of my tutorials together in one place. :)

if anyone is interested, i have this piece for sale (without the frame) in my etsy shop, available by clicking here.