It's 11 pm and I'm still up

This has been a long day. But I couldn't go to bed without working on one more card for my display on Sunday.

One of the Sale-a-Bration sets I preordered was Merci. I got it for the large flower and heart image, thinking it would be nice for Valentine's cards. And it was. But otherwise I have struggled with this set. It's not exactly my style, so my goal of having a card to show using it was definitely a challenge. My starting point was the wide grosgrain ribbon in brocade blue. I don't often reach for the wide ribbon, or this color, so it seemed like a good starting point. I wanted a nice, fresh, springy color combo so I went with apricot appeal and very vanilla.

Seeing that time was in short supply - well, and brain power too - I checked out Beate's weekend sketch challenge. It's just wonderful knowing that these extra-talented stampers are out there giving challenges all the time, because it always gets me thinking in new ways. I wasn't sure about this one at first, till I remembered that the 6x6 hostess paper pack has apricot in it. I have used this paper so much - I think I will have to get another one at some point. I chose the stripe, since I used dots on my baby card this morning. Those two prints are the ones I always seem to reach for first. To make the layers, I first cut the brocade blue panel to 4x5.25" and then the apricot paper to 3.75x5". That way when I cut it into four equal pieces, I ended up with a nice narrow strip of blue between each section. I hadn't done any samples with corner treatments yet so I used the ticket corner punch on this one.

After trying a few different things, I decided to do a window card. I really love using punches in this way. I wanted to showcase the flower in the image rather than the heart, so this seemed perfect. I stamped it in blue and then colored in with apricot, and just a little blue right in the center of the flower. For the blue panel I did something new - I hate to say it but I don't like the single flower stamp that's in this set, but I wanted flowers on my panel, so I used Versamarker to color in just the flower. It's a little tricky since it's very easy to get uneven coverage. But I got the effect I wanted. I'll have to play with it some more.

The ribbon was another tricky thing, because as I was doing the card, I forgot that I wanted to use the wide blue ribbon. I couldn't think where to put it since the main panel was also blue. Then I remembered that I have apricot ribbon, and came up with this double ribbon knot. I just layered the two and knotted them as I would any single ribbon, with a bit of twisting at the one end to get the layers to show correctly. Tell me honestly, what do you think of this? I go back and forth on it. Since the ribbon is thicker than normal I mounted the panel on dimensionals.

I finished off with a sentiment from the Hugs and Wishes set - I think what I like most about this card is the crispness of the colors and the edges contrasted with the script in the sentiment and the curly lines of the image. Not bad considering I hardly slept last night. Now I have just one more sample to do, and hopefully I'll get that posted in the morning. If I can get out of bed in time, that is!