Inspiration Challenge #7: Cardigan

For today’s challenge I chose this pretty sweater from Garnet Hill. If you want to check out different views or zoom in you can click here for the original. You might be wondering why there's so much celery on my cards... in the catalog the three colors of the sweater were all right together, along with matching camis and pants, and I think in my head the rose sweater had the celery green on it. That's what I love about inspiration challenges - there are always so many different ways to approach them.

I did something a little unusual while I was working on this challenge. I stamped four of the flowers with the intention of making four cards all the same – one of my preferred ways to get multiple cards for craft fairs, because if I don’t do it that way from the start, I usually don’t want to go back and make the same card again. I ended up playing around and doing four different cards with them, and the photo shows them from left to right in the order I made them. (Supplies are Stampin’ Up! unless otherwise noted.)

Here is how this went. I did the center panels first. I stamped the speckled background from Itty Bitty Backgrounds with celery, and to be sure it was not too dark I stamped off once on a scrap first. For the flowers, I used the Heartfelt Thanks set. I stamped the stem in certainly celery and the flowers in regal rose by picking up ink on my blender pen and coloring onto the stamp. (If you close the pad and press down on the lid, you’ll get some ink you can dip your pen into. I use this trick all the time!) Then I overstamped the outline in old olive. The flower fit perfectly in my largest Marvy scalloped oval punch, so I punched out a frame from celery cardstock and trimmed it to size. I did four of those just alike. I also made four panels of celery paper and stamped “heartfelt” in olive at the bottom of each. And then it started getting crazy!

I took my first flower and mounted it on regal rose cardstock. When I put it up against the dot paper I thought, it needs another layer. I wished I hadn’t already taped the pink on because I thought it would look better with an olive panel between the celery and rose. I realized I’d also intended to sponge the edges and use a corner punch. Since it was too late for those things, I decided to do them on the rest of the cards, and for this one just mounted the panels as shown and added the organdy bow (ribbon from Papermart).

Then for card #2, I got out my ticket corner punch. I decided to only punch the background paper and the flower frame, and leave the other two panels intact with a brad in the corner. The panel is mounted on dimensionals.

By this time I thought, why not just keep playing around and make them all different? The third and fourth ones both use an EK Success scalloped corner punch. I really like these corners. These cards are the same except for the ribbon treatment. On the third one I layered wide white organdy (also from Papermart) and celery grosgrain behind the panel, and on the last one I tied white grosgrain on top of the panel and added a knot of celery grosgrain on top.

So, which one do you like best? I have my favorite but I won’t tell since I’m curious what you all have to say. Please leave me a comment and let me know, and play along with the challenge!