Inspiration Challenge #12: Floral Fantasy bag

Would you be surprised to learn that most weeks I only choose my inspiration piece a day or two in advance? (Probably not, if you're someone who knows me well!) It’s not like I would run out of options, since I have a whole bunch stashed away, but usually I look at everything that comes in the mail and by Monday there has been one thing that really grabbed me, and that’s what I pick.

That’s how it was with this purse, which comes from a company called Monterey Bay. We get sooooo many catalogs, and most of them I’d probably never order from, but I still look at everything since you never know where you might find inspiration! This purse is called the Floral Fantasy bag, and I just loved it right away and saw lots of possibilities.

I chose my Priceless set for this challenge since the purse looks kind of boho to me. The colors I picked are sahara sand for the background, certainly celery for the swirls, and tempting turquoise and groovy guava for the flowers. To get the stamping to really show on the sand cardstock, I decided to stamp in craft ink (where possible) and emboss with clear EP. For the guava, I first inked the stamp in Versamark and then in guava, and I think it worked pretty well. Maybe it made the ink look darker, though? It seems kind of off compared to the cardstock.

I liked the curvy edge on the bag and duplicated it using chocolate chip cardstock and a new item Todd gave me for my birthday. It’s a set of Fiskars decorative templates. Mostly it’s all sorts of shapes, letters, and images, but each template has a decorative edge. Aha! I tried a couple different things before I hit on this solution, and I love it. The embossed swirls on the brown panel were done with Versamark.

I like getting these boho cards nice and dirty and used my chocolate chip ink on everything, even the card base. I did this style of opening because that’s what was left after I cut my first piece of sand cardstock, LOL!

The sentiment is from Think Happy Thoughts, which is such a fun set to use with punches. I wanted some copper on the card and put a Making Memories brad in the center of my guava flower. A little piercing seemed like a good idea, so I added that on the scallop, then I popped the scallop on with dimensionals, added the turquoise ribbon, and put it all together. I am really loving how this turned out, and for once I didn’t CASE or start from anyone’s challenge but my own. It’s good to do that sometimes to remind myself that I can – even if my sketches are simple, I still feel good when I come up with a card that works all out of my own head.

If you want to play along, leave me a comment with a link to your card. Keyword for uploading on SCS is DSIC12 today. Please link back here from your upload. Thanks for reading and have a great day!