Chocolate Box & Roses Tutorial

Hello everyone. It is an absolute pleasure to kick off the official start of the Whimsy Inspirations Blog with this lovely little chocolate box made using the Whimsy Oval Snippets sentiment set. This box would make a delightful Mother's day or Birthday gift. At the bottom of this post you will also be getting the treat of a tutorial on how the roses on this box were made.

Ann (raindropecho) has created some beautiful sentiment sets for the Whimsy store and I wanted to showcase one of the sets to show how versatile they are. The box lid has the tiny flower from the Oval Snippets stamped all over it in red versacolour ink. The tag has one of the oval frames with the 'Sent with love' sentiment stamped in the same ink. The box was finished off with some red organza ribbon, 2 handmade flowers, a few punched leaves and 2 heart pins. The pink flower was made using Tattered Rose and Worn Lipstick and the red flower uses Fired Brick and Aged Mahogany distress inks.

Handmade Rose Tutorial.

I'll start by saying that I cannot take credit for the original idea behind these flowers. I saw an article in Craft Stamper magazine where designer Hels Sheridan made some roses from grungepaper. As I didn't have any grungepaper I decided to try the technique out on normal card stock and this is the result. So thank you to Hels for the inspiration.

Tools:
White Card.
Black permanent dye ink pad
Flower stamp
Acrylic block (Optional depending on the stamp type)
Scissors
Distress ink pads and blending tool
Glue
Pegs
Stickles

Instructions:
Step 1.

Stamp up some flowers onto white card. You will need 5 flower shapes for a single rose.Tip: when using distress inks, an inkpad like Momento is best as it will not smudge.

Step 2.
Cut the flower shapes out.
Step 3.

Colour the flower shapes with two colours of distress inks. Colour the whole flower with the lighter colour and then blend the edges of the petals with the darker colour.

Step 4.

Make some cuts into the flower shapes as shown in the red shapes below. (From the bottom - Keep 2 flowers with no cuts, the middle flower has a cut between two of the petals that goes to the centre of the shape, the 4th one has one petal removed (you will not use that single petal), and the top one is cut into two so that there is a 3-petal and a 2-petal shape.)

Step 5.

Colour the back of the two petal shape. Curl the petals as shown using either an embossing ball tool, a flower shaper, or a bone scoring tool. It is important to leave one complete flower shape and the 2-petal shape without any curling.

Step 6.

Add glue to the petals indicated below. Stick the adjacent petal (after the gap or the snip to the centre) on top of the petal with the glue and peg these together until they dry. With the 2-petal shape, just roll it up and glue the edge to make the centre of the flower.

Step 7
When the glue is dry, apply stickles to the edges of the petals.

Step 8
Glue the petal shapes, one on top of the other, to make the rose. You may need to trim the bottom of the rose centre so that is doesn’t stick up too much.
These flowers also look gorgeous when misted with glimmermist rather than using the stickles.

Thanks for looking.

Sharon xx