Zinnia!

Woke up this morning to MORE SNOW on the ground, even though it was in the 60's two days ago! I'm hoping my budding lilacs, tulips and hyacinths weren't ruined. It is beautiful & sunny outside right now, and the snow is gone, so I'll keep my fingers crossed. 

Can't wait until I can plant some zinnia seeds in my flower beds. I had the most amazing fuschia, orange & chartreuse (my favorite) ones in my garden last year, and they last forever in bouquets. Until then, I had fun making this one. You can't see some of the layers (there's a neon fuschia layer just under the outer yellow layer) or coloration in the pix - I chalked some of the outer petals in fuschia, too, and reversed the paper so that some layers are textured and some not.  I found that stroking the petals on a thick Foamy pad with the cap on the end of my new Quick-Stik (LOVE IT!), worked really well together to get the petals to cup just the right amount. I cut the leaf by hand (gasp!), but will add a leaf to the cut file.

I saw this neat trick on a TV show the other day: The woman was using a hemostat (not what I called it in my misspent youth) to hold a pom-pom to use for chalking, instead of the ubiquitous Q-Tip. The pom-pom is so much nicer, and can be changed out for each color. My pom-pom is huge - I was too lazy to go down to my sewing room to get some small ones, and had these in my stash here in the study. At least with the bigger size, you can flip it around to get two colors out of one pom-pom, as you can see! I also really like using wedge-shaped sponges meant for applying makeup for chalking larger areas.

The svg is here.