Not so metal flowers

A couple of days ago,  one of my stamp enablers suggested a shoebox get-together, which is to say, we create a card, put all the materials to make it in a single shoebox, and let everyone else make a card like ours.  I opened my mouth before thinking and said I would do a Tim Holtz style card, which was met with some approval, but after I got home, I realized what an insane prospect that would be.  Everything Tim Holtz designs is created with the idea to use as many of his products as possible at one time.  It would be silly to try and fit all things necessary for a Tim Holtz card in a single shoebox.

However, I was not going to completely abandon my original idea.  I have done nice things with Tim stuff that weren't strictly Tim, and looked through my past photos and scans for some inspiration.  I stumbled across this old tag:


I remembered that I particularly liked it at the time because instead of running out and spending 20 bucks on Tim's metal flowers and metal corners, I made my own out of cardstock.  I think my flower-making skills (all my skills, actually) have improved somewhat over time, so I decided to base my card on this tag.

The first thing I needed to do is make "metal" cardstock.  For me, that involves metallic paint and black or brown cardstock.  Then I whipped out the punches, to create the components.  Here is all the stuff I used:

The two colorful pieces of cardstock that you can see underneath are how they look dripped with paint and the colors smeared around with a credit card.  as blotchy as it looks as a big sheet of paper, punched into small pieces, it looks tarnished - everything Tim needs to look old, right?  Here is a close-up of the flowers:

 The reflection makes it look particularly shiny, but actually, it looks like tarnished metal.  I made some dimensional flowers, and then I realized that maybe a mailable card would be better, so I worked on some flatter flowers (the ones on the left will all lie flat in an envelope).

Obviously, I will bring the cardstock already painted, but now I am wondering if I should punch all the flowers, too, and just let the other players assemble them.  This is just the flowers - I also have to consider how I am going to do all the other parts, as well.  Damn you, Tim Holtz, and your dementing effect on my brain!