Inspiration Challenge #28: Hallmark gift bag

This week's inspiration again came out of some cleaning - this time it was Sarah's room. I found this adorable Hallmark bag from one of her baby gifts. I thought it would be a different sort of challenge since I don't usually pick these bright colors or this style of image. Hope you'll find it a fun challenge! This week's keyword for SCS is DSIC28.

I hope you can see on the bag that the flowers, purse, and shoes have glitter on them. I knew that I wanted to use glitter somehow - but I am glitter challenged! Every time I use it, it comes out looking awful. I was determined to make it work for this challenge. I used Julee's Mojo Monday sketch for my layout.


The first thing I tackled were the glittery flowers. I stamped the large flower from Enjoy Every Moment on white cardstock with Versamark. I did use the embossing buddy first, although the only color where that seemed to make a difference was with the darker pink. I applied heat and stick powder to the flowers, heated the images, then added the glitter and heated briefly to make sure the glitter would stick. I used the rose pink and light blue from SU's Fine Cosmo glitter, and the lighter pink is Miss Muffet art glitter from Barbara Trombley.

Even with the embossing buddy, some glitter always stuck to the page, but I was able to brush a lot of it off. I also ended up cutting out the flowers because the dots that went around the image just didn't look good with the glitter. Tip of the day: When using glitter on stamped images, choose an image without much detail and not too small. If you have your own tips on stamping with glitter, please share them with us!

To finish the flowers I stamped the 1/2" circle from the same stamp set and added celery SU glitter in the same way, then punched the circles and added to the flowers with glue dots. The leaves are from the SAB Friendship Blooms set and were cut out. I attached all the flowers and leaves to a narrow white panel with dimensionals - I like the out of the box look here. Then I layered the white onto a bashful blue panel.

The rest of the card was pretty quick. I did a celery scalloped panel to match the green scallops on the bag. Across the top I added a strip of pomegranate dot ribbon that came from a retired scrappin' kit. I added a sentiment from Many Happy Returns, oval punched and accented with crystal brads from Making Memories. The background is pretty in pink embossed with CB Swiss Dots, layered onto a pomegranate panel and a white card.

Hope you enjoy these summery colors! I'm already seeing the fall colors appearing in the catalogs I'm getting... so you'll probably be seeing them in my challenges in the not-too-distant future.

Oh, and speaking of colors, my new catty preorder shipped yesterday - woohoo! Hopefully next week I'll be able to show you lots of fun new stuff, and I can't wait to try out the new In Colors. They are much brighter than last year and I wasn't sure they would appeal to me, but I'm getting more excited to try them the more I see them on other demos' projects. So stay tuned for the unveiling next week!