LIM 178 Guest designer spot & my first ever tutorial - pop can flowers!

I am so excited this week to have had the opportunity to be a guest designer on the Less is More challenge blog. The remit was a recipe to use a recycled element on your card whilst maintaining the CAS style. This was a great project for me, not only because I like to recycle and find ways of reusing different things in my crafting but also because I am not fortunate enough to have lots of money to spend on my hobby and therefore if you can create beautiful cards from free stuff what's not to like!

I have played around with several ideas but settled on these two for the challenge. The first card uses the technique of iris folding, one of the first techniques that drew me into cardmaking and made it such an important part of my life. I have reduced the size of the original sailboat design, a pattern I have used many times. The main recycled element is to use the insides of standard envelopes that arrive in the post (mainly blue, but also some orange) to make my iris folding strips. The bright blue strips are from one of my wage packets!

The iris folded panel is finished off with two strips of recycled ric-rac used as waves. I also deliberately chose a scalloped edged card to reflect the watery theme!

The second card I made uses a technique that has become a favourite of mine, making die-cut metal flowers by recycling pop and beer cans. I first discovered this technique several years ago whilst browsing YouTube for different methods of creating flowers. These can be used on cards but could also be used as a brooch or as a hair slide. I think these flowers are so stunning that they just need a little something to show them off but not much so the CAS style is perfect for this!

Over the last few years I have discovered so much information and inspiration from tutorials and photos on other crafter's blogs. To thank everyone whose blog I have ever taken something from I would like to give something back by putting my first ever tutorial on my blog! So here is the method I use to make these flowers. I decided to do it in a pdf format as this made it easier to put together and will, I hope, be easier for people that want to download the project. Apart from that I couldn't place the photos exactly where I wanted to in the body of my post!

Click here to view my pop can flowers tutorial pdf

Thank you to Chrissie for giving me this fantastic DT opportunity. I will visit as many of your blogs as time allows to see how you all get on with the challenge and will look forward to joining in again soon!

Thanks so much for visiting my little world
Stef x