Bloom for a Great Friend

Wow, I guess it's been a few days... I have a lot on my plate from now until mid-August so my apologies in advance if I'm not around much. It's one of those times when some things I'd rather be doing (like making cards!) have to be set aside.

I did need to make a couple cards this week, though. This one is for an Etsy customer - I'll be making an altered journal to go with it (my first!) as soon as the journal arrives from SU. So I'll have that to show you in a few days. For now here is the card, which also uses today's sketch challenge.

My customer had chosen this paper (SEI's Mimosa) so I knew I was working with that. I started out making the background and the circle, using crushed curry for the card base and dusty durango for the layers. Next I had to decide what image(s) to use. Although I liked the curry and durango cardstock with these papers, the inks didn't look quite right, so I decided to use Copics with this flower from Papertrey Ink's In Bloom set.

I stamped with Memento tuxedo black and then sat down with my Copics to try to match colors to the papers... If anyone has run across any tips for getting your Copics to match patterned paper, could you pass them along to me? ;) It wasn't easy, and in the end the flower and leaves turned out darker than I wanted. But I hope it works OK. I cut out the flower with the paper tole technique, which is really easy with this image and looks so cool. Since I had a little glitter on one of my papers, I added some Sakura glitter pen to the images.

The sentiment was also requested by my customer - I stamped it in dusty durango, cut it out, and mounted on dimensionals. Then I just had to decide what embellishments to use. Again, I tried a few things but ended up with this old olive ribbon from the Elementary Ribbon Originals and a Bo Bunny brad. Tip of the day: Using your craft & rubber scissors you can cut off the back of a brad and then just attach it with a glue dot. No need to puncture your ribbon! Isn't that a great tip? I wish I could remember where I read it!

Well, I'm off to work on my second (and probably last) card of the week: my sample for tomorrow's Divine Diva Inspiration Challenge. We've had a couple weeks off so I'm excited to have a challenge for you in the morning! Hope you'll come back then, and thanks for stopping by!