Australian Gum Blossom Card

While not strictly a male card, this card is at least not all that feminine, and could be used for a man who is a nature lover or keen gardener. This card features Australian gum blossoms and leaves. Gum blossoms in nature come in shades of red through pink to pale cream.


The card is a pre-purchased 5  inch square pearlised card in a pale sea foam colour. I used a dark olive green board at 4 3/4 inches square and then sacrificed another card from the pack to cut the top board at 4 5/8 inches. The leaves were cut from grey and dark green paper and I drew the veins in afterwards with a fine tipped black pen. The ribbon was 1/4 inch wide gold ribbon, wrapped around my fingers 3 times, wired in the centre and the wire wrapped around the base of the ribbon. The ribbon was glued in place using a hot glue gun.The 6 gum nuts were wired into two groups of 3 and glued into place with the glue gun, followed by the wired gum blossoms, and finally the full gum blossoms were glued over the top. If the stems are too long, don’t trim back too far, fold the excess up and use this for the hot glue to grip on to, to hold it in place.
My bubblejet printer refused to print on the pearlised card and after several paper jams, I matched the colour as best  could in a word document, added the lettering on top using a text box, and cut out the oval. I cut a slightly larger oval in the dark olive green to back it, and used foam tape to mount the wording on the dark oval. I punched a tiny hole in both and threaded through some thin gold cord. The cord and the plaque were glued into place.

I have written a tutorial on how to make the blossoms and half blossoms. I will be doing a tutorial on the gum nuts soon, so check my tutorial pages for those. I’ll also be putting up some digital stamps for the leaves as well as cutting files for those with e-cutters. The stamps can be used as pattern for cutting out leaves from coloured card or you can print them on to white paper/card and colour them with ink pens and cut them out.