Inspiration Challenge #11: Mix & Match Swimwear

For this week's challenge I chose a swimwear collection by Athleta. Sorry (again) for the not-so-good picture; I really wanted to show you all the prints side by side. If you click here you can see all their mix and match prints and zoom in. You should be able to see which ones I was using, but hey, there are a bunch of other cool prints there, so if you see something you like better, go for it! I'm not picky!

For my card I used the pink on white for the background and the brown piping for the layers. I chose the Stitched background stamp - what a fantastic stamp! - and pixie pink ink. The rest of the images come from the coordinating set Stitched Exotics. The other colors I picked out were pumpkin pie, certainly celery, and chocolate chip.

The layout came from Julee Tillman's Monday Mojo sketch challenge #27. I've never been brave enough to try one of Julee's sketches - her work is amazing and the sketches usually look, well, challenging! But I like to stretch my skills now and then and I thought this week's sketch was fabulous. Unfortunately I didn't plan ahead too well. I put the whole center panel together before checking it against the card for size, and it's bigger than the one in Julee's sketch. In fact it turned out to be exactly 5.5", the height of the card! But I'll still consider it to use Julee's sketch. I also had to cut down the number of flowers from four to three because that was all I could fit!

OK, on to the card. I picked out the pumpkin pie paper for the main panel from my Bali Breeze collection. Then I stamped the three flowers in pink and chocolate chip and cut them out. For the leaves I used my Stamp-a-ma-jig to line up the leaf and the stitched outline - I wish they had made the outline bigger so that it would turn out like the stitches around the flowers, but oh well. Once everything was cut I mounted it onto the paper. The flowers are popped up on dimensionals, and I used two layers for the brown flower so that it would be above the rest. The sentiment is from the Sale-a-Bration set Lots of Thoughts, and I inked only the large part of the stamp so that it would fit under the ribbon.

To finish off the layout I really wanted pixie pink paper, but I don't have any so I made my own with one of the swirl stamps. Once the panels were arranged, I wrapped some wide celery ribbon around the added the pink flowers, attached with glue dots. I think it's a very cheery and fun card!

Hope you'll play along this week. Here is a keyword for uploading on SCS: DSIC11. Come and find some inspiration today!