Doing the polka, Dot... (365 Cards, days 12 and 13)

I had FUN with Day 12 - Circle Frenzy... you had to use at least 20 circles from at least two different sources. Think I got it covered? I was quite pleased with myself for managing to incorporate five different 'dotty' papers into my first card! One tip if you want to scraplist this design - start from the MIDDLE of the card. I lay down the papers starting from the outside edges and making them mirror-image each other... and it worked great until I had to try to cut a triangle exactly the right size for the middle of the card! The tips are all messy and misaligned so I covered them with the sentiment block.
My second card was a five-minute job to use up some of the scraps from cutting all the triangles of paper for the first card... I glued them down randomly, and stamped some rows of circles with a border stamp.

 The third card uses even more of the scraps, only this time I punched them into circles myself using a 1-inch punch and a regular hole puncher and scattered them randomly around the card.

Day 13 was a real challenge, and it took four attempts to make my card come out the way that I wanted it to. The challenge is to use a paper-pieced and/or stamped image and to make it three dimensional by raising PART of the image, but not the whole thing. I started with a simple flower stem, (one flower, two large leaves and a bunch of tiny hearts) and I knew that I wanted to raise the flowers and leaves in some way, but it took me a few tries to figure it out. Stamping the whole image didn't work because the leaves are solid rubber, so I coloured the stamp with markers and stamped each part of the image seperately. The stems and tiny leaves went down on the card itself, then I stamped the flowers onto blue paper, and coloured the leaves in with two different markers to texture them a little. The big leaves are only glued in the center, and the flowers are half on popdots and half glued at the base with the petals folded up.