Resurfacing...

I am so sorry I've neglected my blog for so long. First we all came down with a stomach bug. That knocked us out for several days, and it happened in the midst of another project that's been consuming my time. I'm trying to reorganize my stamping space. I've gone through everything and gotten rid of a lot of stuff, and I'm really hoping I will have better organization that will stick and help me keep the space looking nice all the time. I will show you photos when it's ready for public viewing, LOL, but I'm working on it in the middle of getting ready for club, Sarah's birthday, and my mom and stepdad coming from Indiana. I hope in the next week it'll be (at least mostly) done.


For now, though, I do have a card to show you. Our May hostess over at Our Creative Corner, Loretta Lock, gave us a really fun challenge this week: make a Mother's Day card with no flowers. I love a good challenge and this one really got me thinking! I'd seen this card by Vicki Webb and I thought a stencil with a sentiment stamped on top would be super cool, and would give me a place to start that didn't involve flowers.

I chose this stencil from the Elegant Trio set (sigh, remember Carte Postale?) and a monochromatic color scheme of soft suede and very vanilla. I sponged the ink over the stencil with a dauber, very lightly and unevenly to get a vintage look. Then I stamped the sentiment from All Holidays over it. For more vintage style I used the color spritzer and my soft suede marker over the panel. After using the ticket corner punch on both layers, I sponged all the edges for even more shabby goodness.

Early on I thought I wanted to use vanilla satin ribbon. I decided to keep the background simple to allow the image and the bow to shine, so I simply cut a panel of Thoroughly Modern DP to 4 1/4" x 5 1/2", sponged the edges, then wrapped three lengths of ribbon around it before adhering it to the vanilla card base. After I made my bow, I wrapped gold elastic cord around the center, leaving tails to string the Pretties Kit beads. To get the beads to lay flat, I tied the cord in a knot right under the ribbon knot, then strung the beads and knotted the ends of the cord. Tip of the day: Knot the ends of the cord twice or it won't be big enough to hold the beads on. The center of the ribbon didn't look so good with the gold cord wrapped around it, so I just covered that up with one of the larger half pearls from the Pretties Kit.

I have to say, I love how this turned out. I'll be using this for a club card this weekend and I hope my stampers love it, too. All the rest of you, go be inspired by all the other wonderful creations from the OCC team, and thanks for stopping by today!