Too much inspiration!

The inspiration challenge over at SCS today was such a cool piece - lots of possibilities. My head was spinning with ideas but I only had time to do one card right now. I really need to start my next freelance project. Maybe I can catch up later...

I took my inspiration from the two green and ivory pillows on the left side of the photo. I liked the idea of a row of medallions over some kind of swirl or flourish. And then I realized that if I did flourishes then it also qualified for the Stamp Simply challenge from Sharon Johnson. I always like multitasking!

I looked through all my stamps and settled on the retired Stippled Stencils set and the Baroque Motifs flourish background. The stencil background is stamped with certainly celery, stamped off once first, and then the flower stamped in old olive. I cut out the stencils and the celery squares with deckle-edge scissors from Fiskars. I stamped the flourish in olive ink on olive cardstock and then sized the panel so that I would have room for the sentiment (by Hero Arts, stamped in olive) on the vanilla layer underneath. I don't think I've ever done this before - it felt like both an "Aha!" and a "Duh!" moment! I put another celery and olive layer underneath and attached wide celery grosgrain and narrow artichoke grosgrain (I think the artichoke ribbon looks great with old olive, actually) and mounted the stencil squares with dimensionals, then put it all onto a vanilla card. I actually meant to dirty up the edges and/or use a corner punch but I started putting it together and then remembered those things. Oops! Next time.