If you follow me on Instagram, you’ll probably seen all the pictures I’ve been posting of the succulent plants and flowers that I’ve been making lately. I have made dozens and dozens of these plants. Seriously, dozens. In fact, I had to clear off a two foot section of my desk to make space for all of them so I could organize them to see what colors and sizes I have.
I have made a bunch of projects using these plants and I still have dozens of succulents left over for more projects. It’s amazing, when you get all the different sizes and varieties all bunched up together in a pot or on a canvas, they look real. In fact, when my daughter saw this project, she asked me where I bought these plants because the colors are amazing. She was floored that they were actually made out of paper.
And without further ado, here’s one of my latest projects using the Succulent Framelits. Oh my goodness! I am over the moon excited for how this project turned out. Just look at all of those fabulous succulent plants. 
I found the wheelbarrow at a local craft store. It was in the section with all the new Spring garden stuff. It’s about 18″ long to give you an idea of the size of this thing. I used a piece of foam to fit inside the back of the wheelbarrow to fill up some of the space. I added brown moss from the floral section to hide the white foam. The foam was cut to fit in the wheelbarrow, but it isn’t glued down to the wheelbarrow. This gives me the option to put something else in it in the future. 
I tried to balance out all the different greens by mixing everything together, while trying to evenly space each of the four greens. I know that doesn’t sound like it makes sense. But, when you craft there is this thing called the “visual triangle”, which is supposed to be the most pleasing placement of objects. The different greens are all arranged in visual triangles – there just happens to be a lot of triangles in this project.
The larger plants are on floral wire so they sit slightly higher than the other little plants. And yes, I inked every single one of those itty-bitty petals and raised them to make them look more realistic.
I won’t kid you on how long it took to put this together. It took days to make this. I spent an entire afternoon die cutting the succulents in Mint Macaron, Wild Wasabi, Old Olive, Pear Pizzazz and Rich Razzleberry. Then I spend several hours inking them trying to find the right combination of inks for each of the different greens. The Mint Macaron and Wild Wasabi are inked in Tip Top Taupe. The Pear Pizzazz and Old Olive are inked first in Coral Calypso and then Tip Top Taupe over the the Coral. It really gives it an amazing orange-brownish color that closely resembles what you’ll see in a garden. The Rich Razzleberry is inked in Rich Razzleberry.
Most of the larger plants take 6 or 7 layers. The plants that I used as “ground cover” are two layers, with all of the petals raised in the top layer.
For the die cutting process, I laid out scraps of card stock on my cutting platform and then laid out every single die was going to use and cut all of them at once. Then I’d run another sheet through. And another. And another. And another… This is an excellent way to use up all of those scraps you’re hoarding. I ended up with piles of cut pieces in each color. Then one color at a time, I inked each die cut. Once they were inked, I laid them out in combinations to make sure I had enough of the right sizes. Then I started glueing the layers together using my fine-tip glue pen. And set them aside to allow time for drying.
Once everything was dry, I organized my succulents by size, style, and color so I would know how many of each I had left as I worked.
Then I spent hours with my hot glue gun glueing moss to foam and then each individual plant to the moss. Then floral wire to the larger plants and gluing those in as well. Then adding in all the little Rich Razzleberry flowers in various sizes.
And one more close-up shot of all those beautiful flowers…Don’t forget Sale-abration is going on right now. For every $50 purchase (pre-tax and shipping), you can pick one free Sale-abration item. What a deal! I don’t know about you, but I’m always looking for a good deal which is why I signed up to be a Demonstrator. If you always want to get your craft supplies at a discount, we need to talk.
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