Bonus Sunday Challenge #2: Old Habits Are Hard to Break...

but let's see if we can move out of our comfort zones a little with this challenge! (I'm posting early just in case tomorrow is crazy and I don't get the opportunity, and you subscribers might actually get this emailed to you in the morning!)

My idea for this challenge came from the card I made for the swap I attended today. We were instructed to keep the cards fairly simple - so that they could be made in 8 minutes or less. We were supposed to use no more than two layers, including the card. Gasp! Is that even possible? ;) It was definitely a challenge for me to keep it down to that. I'm not sure my card completely qualifies, but I know I would have added at least one more layer.

The challenge, then, is this: do two things differently than you normally would. It could be a limited supplies challenge, if you use fewer layers, or it could be colors you wouldn't normally use, or anything else you can think of. My second deviation from normal is a little one, but is something I've noticed in my cards lately. I often seem to put the sentiment in the lower right corner. I don't know why - it just ends up there. So this time it's on the left. Anyway, I'm sure the list of possibilities is endless.

And now for my card. I wanted to use something new, and something that didn't seem quite as popular. I was thinking that I hadn't seen many cards using Stitched Exotics yet. Sure enough, there were only 32 in the SCS gallery when I looked. To be honest I find this set a little hard to work with, but I do like the images so I'm going to keep playing with it. For this card I stamped the main flower in taken with teal on a white strip, then stamped the swirls in old olive on either side. I mounted it to a background panel from the Bali Breeze collection (love this paper so much). As a border I tied a piece of wide old olive ribbon across the bottom of the white panel. I have to add that I found it so amusing that my knot on this card led to my giving knot-tying tutorials to three different people today! I hope it was helpful. The sentiment is from Bitty Birthday and fits perfectly in the small oval punch. Then I put it onto a larger teal oval and adhered to the ribbon with a glue line. That's it!

Hope you'll play this challenge with me - if you upload to SCS you can use the keyword DSBSC2. Have fun pushing the envelope!