Inspired by Pier 1

I'm excited to be hosting the SCS inspiration challenge this weekend! I had such a hard time choosing what to use, but ended up with this Pier 1 living room. I loved all the colors, textures, and shapes in the room. Here is a link to their online catalog - the room is on pages 4-5. There you can zoom in to look more closely at all the details.

For my card, my main sources of inspiration were the curtains and the grid on the window. I spent the majority of my time making the stamped floral panel, which I did in several steps: First I took very vanilla cardstock and scored a diagonal grid of lines 1" apart with my Scor-Pal. Then I inked the Linen background stamp with chocolate chip, stamped off twice, and stamped onto the grid to get just the faintest texture. I stamped the two sizes of flowers and leaves with tangerine tango and chocolate chip, using my Stamp-a-ma-jig for placement. I set it aside for the time being, not wanting to cut into it until I had a better idea what I was going to do with it.

I wanted to use a rectangle of the stamped panel and considered using Nestabilities, but in the end decided to make the scalloped layer with my scallop edge punch. It took some trial and error, but if you line up where you want your corner to be so that it's over top of the punch guideline, your corners will come out evenly. I trimmed my stamped panel to size as I was going along, since I wasn't sure what size I would need until I was doing it. And of course I didn't think to measure anything as I was going along, so I can only tell you that the finished stamped panel is 3 1/4" by 4 3/8". Before mounting the two together I sponged the edges of both with chocolate chip.

I tried a lot of different things for finishing off the card and in the end kept it pretty simple. I cut a tangerine panel and stamped the Linen background in tangerine, then stamped the background again (second generation) in tangerine on a vanilla card base. That gave it just a little texture but didn't distract from the main panel. The sentiment from Lots of Thoughts was stamped with chocolate chip on vanilla, then punched out with the large oval and placed in a copper Hodgepodge Hardware frame. Instead of using brads, I took wide grosgrain chocolate chip ribbon, threaded it through the holes, and attached the ribbon ends to the ribbon band with glue dots. I adhered the frame with two pop-up glue dots. Tip of the day: This ribbon is pretty tough to get through the hardware holes, I found. It tends to fray and wrinkle. So pull it through very carefully, and leave yourself some extra length in case you have to trim down.

I had a lot of fun planning this challenge and I hope everyone will play along this weekend!