Book-Style Birthday Cards – Rose Construction

I’m making good progress on my two book-style birthday cards, one for Wonderwoman’s mum’s 70th birthday and the other for my mum’s 90th.
When I was cutting all the pieces to make Penny Duncan’s 3D roses, I made a mistake with the numbers of pieces required. I made up the black and gold ones as per instructions, but ended up with fewer than I’d planned, with a few odd pieces left over. I decided that I wouldn’t cut into another piece of the iridescent black cardstock, but would use these leftovers to create a different style of flower. To make things a bit more interesting, I drew designs on them with my embossing pen, and then heat- embossed them in gold. I shall have to make some sort of centres for them.

Here’s a close-up of some of them.

When I came to make the pink roses for my mum’s card, I decided to go with the pieces I had, and not cut more to make up the deficit, but make the roses with one layer less than specified – Penny says you can leave out a layer if you want them smaller and less full. I have cut the pieces from pink cardstock and then inked them with Victorian Velvet Distress Ink, making the piece for the centre of the rose dark, and gradually lightening until the outermost part, which I thought would give a nice dimensional feel to the roses. Here are the pieces, inked and ready for hand-embossing and assembly.

This is a picture of the pieces required to make one rose, hand-embossed and ready for assembly. The two inner pieces are assembled in “cup” form and the two (or three if you are using all the pieces in the cut file) outer pieces in “dome” form. The two inner pieces have a slit between two of the petals into the centre hole. The next piece has a small hole, and the outer piece has no hole. If you are using all the pieces in the file, the extra piece has a large hole and no slit, and is assembled third. Also in the photo, you can see my embossing tool, and the piece of funky foam that I use for hand embossing.

Also included in the file is a leaf piece, but I have not done anything with this yet, because I don’t know how the design of the cards is going to pan out. I can cut and colour them later if necessary.

The following pictures show the assembly of the rose. For full instructions, and video tutorial, please see Penny Duncan’s blog – the address is in my Blog List.
The first picture shows the central part, the first petal of which is rolled around a fine pair of tweezers, and subsequent petals rolled around that, and a dab of hot glue from the glue gun to secure the tip.

The next picture shows this central roll attached with a strip of hot glue along the first petal of the second piece.

These petals are also rolled around, crossing the next one half way behind the previous one each time, to cause the overlapping effect of the petals in the centre of the rose.

It is at this stage that the missing piece would be added – the piece with the large hole and no slit. However, leaving it out, I then proceeded to add the next piece, the one with the small hole. Some hot glue was applied around the hole, and the point of the roll was inserted into the hole, and the petals of this piece pushed upwards to form the first more open part of the rose.

To complete the rose, the same process was repeated, using the final piece, the piece with no hole.

Finally, the underside of the finished rose:

This shows how the final piece, pushed upwards and adhered to the base of the previous piece, forms the base of the flower. If used, the trefoil leaf piece would be glued onto this base.

Here are all the flowers, complete. The final touch was to spray them lightly with a little pink glimmer mist to give a little iridescence to the edges of the petals.

For this card, I am also planning to make some cream roses with edges darkened with distress inks. Thinking about it while making the pink roses, I have decided to make the card itself with cream, rather than white card – I think the pink and cream will give a good, vintage effect. I am also planning to distress the edges of the “book” pages and make the small part of the “cover” brown, like aged leather, possibly with a bit of gold decoration. I may also add some vintage text as a background. Hopefully it will all come together OK!