Technique Spotlight with Paige Evans: Fussy Cut & Stitched Flowers

I have a brand new layout and process video to share today! My latest collection with Pink Paislee (called OH MY HEART!) just arrived in stores and one of my favorite papers in this collection is Paper 06 which is full of colorful flowers. I knew I wanted to fussy cut them and use them on a layout.

I started by doing just that: fussy cutting the flowers. I cut out about 80% of the flowers, small, medium, and large. The blue leafy pieces I cut out and then lightly adhered onto a sheet of transparency so that I could easily move them around and figure out where I wanted them without having to move every single piece every single time.

I wasn’t originally thinking about stitching, but as I was cutting out the flowers I noticed the printed details on them such as lines and dots and thought, “Hey! Those could be stitched!” Goodness knows I couldn’t pass up a stitching opportunity!

So I spent some time piercing holes and hand stitching through almost all of the flowers. I even jumped on YouTube and figured out how to make French Knots – so much easier than I thought they would be to create!

Some of the flowers and leaves didn’t have any printed designs on them so I just made up my own. Most of the time I used the same color of thread that was printed on the flowers and leaves to do the stitching, but sometimes I wanted to add in more colors.

Once all of the details were stitched I picked a background cardstock and then figured out the placement – I decided to create a faux bouquet if you will and then adhered everything in place.

Next I hand cut some stems from green patterned papers and cardstock. I hand cut a bow from patterned paper to tie the “bouquet” together.

And of course, what’s a layout without a photo, title, and journaling?! Those were the finishing touches! Everything you see is from my Oh My Heart collection – even the cute li’l heart charm!

Watch this start-to-finish process video to see how this page came to life:

I hope you are inspired to try fussy cutting and adding some hand stitching – it’s all about the details and it really brings this page to life! Thanks for joining me today – see you again soon!