Inspiration Challenge #17: Real Simple magazine cover

This was a new source of inspiration for me: I received the May issue of Real Simple magazine in the mail this week and I knew as soon as I saw it that it would be this week's challenge. Come play along with me, and if you upload to SCS, this week's keyword is DSIC17.

I used the SCS sketch challenge from today for my card again this week. The first thing I noticed on the cover was the tall flower in a bottle, so I was inspired to use a similar stamp. I also love cottage style and the feel of the cover seemed very much in that vein so I wanted to recreate its colors and look.


I first stamped the large flower from Live Your Dream on whisper white cardstock. I inked the whole stamp in pretty in pink, then wiped off the stems and leaves. I used blender pen to pick up some pixie pink ink from the ink pad to color the centers and then colored the stem and leaves with certainly celery marker. (I'm starting to see why the markers are such a great tool to have - but I'll have to make do until I can get more colors!)

I used the same coloring technique on the strip that goes across the card. I thought that stamping in celery and then cutting out pink flowers would be faster than coloring the stamp multiple times - boy, was I wrong!

I decided to do the out of the box technique for the main flower. I penciled in a rectangle around part of the stamped image and then cut it out, letting the flowers and leaves come out of the box where necessary. This way I was able to make the pixie pink panel under the flowers smaller so that more of the background would show.

The background papers are certainly celery and pretty in pink. I chose the same pattern in each color (the pink is in the hostess pack that's in the current catalog). Before assembling I stamped the sentiment from All Year Cheer in pixie pink on the pretty in pink paper, then used my fingernail to distress the edges of the panels. I added celery grosgrain ribbon to the long strip and then put it all together, with the main flower up on dimensionals. I used two layers of dimensionals under the top and bottom of the flower so it's popped up nice and high.

I am hoping that the next card you see from me will *not* be a Mother's Day card! I'm ready to do something different. What that will be... I'm not sure yet, but stay tuned!