I’m calling this the Citrus Blooms Diecut Orange Card because this card is mostly about diecutting. I was interested in trying the leafy frame die in the dies in this Mediterranean Blooms Suite Collection in the new Stampin’ Up! Annual Catalog. If you don’t already own this Suite or parts of it, I would urge you to take a good look this month during the Stampin’ Up! Bundle Sale so you can save a little bit of money on the Citrus Blooms Bundle. Get the very nice stamp set plus the exceptional dies that go with it plus one special pattern in the designer paper. Actually, it was the designer paper that grabbed my attention!

I played around with different layers and colors for the card before finally settling on Basic White for the card base. After I got going on the whole card design, I went back and stamped the little tile-like images with Daffodil Delight ink that are in the Citrus Blooms Stamp Set. It just adds a little bit to the background to keep the white from being too boring. The little suggestion of tiles gives this card a Mediterranean look I think!

The Citrus Blooms Dies have this leafy frame die, plus an outline to go around it. There is even a die to cut out the middle part if you wanted to and use that leafy piece on some other project or even one similar to this card. I cut out the leafy frame out of Garden Green Cardstock. But I wanted a color showing through the spaces between the leaves, so I used the outline die to cut out a Daffodil Delight background to fit perfectly behind the leafy frame.

The orange is diecut from one of the papers in the Mediterranean Blooms Designer Series Paper. I had to go back and watch the Stampin’ Up! video about this whole Suite to refresh my memory on what the dies would cut out because there often is something on the designer papers that one or more of the dies in a set will cut out. It turns out, the paper with the oranges like I used on this card can be diecut with the one die plus some of the little yellow flowers. Since the lighting in my room wasn’t that good and/or my glasses weren’t strong enough I found it difficult to place the dies on those light-colored flowers precisely. I did diecut a few but decided it was quicker to just cut out the ones I wanted by hand! I could have stamped some flowers and diecut those, but I was just using the designer paper at the time.

The orange is diecut and then popped up on Stampin’ Dimensionals in the center of the leafy frame. One of the artists in the video suggested doing some stippling on the orange (tiny dots to show some texture) with a Stampin’ Blend Marker so I did that with the Dark Pumpkin Pie Blend, the small tip, not the brush tip. Just tiny dots around the bottom of the orange. I liked the look. The little cut out flowers are placed around the frame, some popped up, some adhered flat to the card. For a finishing touch, I added three Daffodil Delight Opal Rounds embellishments to the card front.

The greeting is stamped from the Citrus Blooms Stamp Set in Garden Green ink. I chose a die in the Unbounded Love Dies to fit this narrow greeting and to fit in this space. It worked perfectly!

Here is another recent card I made using the Mediterranean Blooms Suite. You can see I diecut the background from one of the tile design papers using that single outline die in the set. For that card, I stamped, colored, and diecut the bunch of oranges. So you can get many different designs with this Suite. The Opal Rounds are back ordered right now so the Suite is not available but with the Bundle Sale you would want to purchase the Citrus Blooms Bundle separately anyway to save the extra 10%. Sale goes through June 30, but don’t delay!

Watch the video and hear how the artists designed this entire set and the samples!