I bow before you, Mary Jo

Today's featured stamper on SCS was the great Mary Jo Albright of the fabulous blog beauty lies within, which I read daily and love! The card I chose to CASE was this wonderful baby card. And now I remember why I usually don't put this much detail into my cards - this was really tough! I feel like I've been working on it for six hours. I guess it really took more like three. Egads! But I do love how it turned out. And I have renewed respect for Mary Jo and all you stampers out there who do this much work to make your cards look so gorgeous!

The changes I made should be pretty obvious. I do have all the stuff that Mary Jo used for her card, but I am all out of going gray cardstock, so I decided to go a totally different route. I decided to stick with the jumbo wheel panel, and I chose my Leaves a la Carte wheel since I thought the flower would make a nice medallion in the upper left corner. But then in order to use the large stamp from Carte Postale, I had to make it a standard size card instead of square.

I went with green again - this time mellow moss and always artichoke, which has to be one of my favorite combos. I love the moss taffeta ribbon so I think that's what actually led me to use it today. I wanted a light color to set off the green, and I chose blush blossom - a color I'm not sure I've ever used. I don't even have the ink and I only have the cardstock because I got the soft subtles pack with my starter kit. But I really love it here! I had to do my own scallop strips around the stamped panel instead of using a punch, since I had changed the shape. The focal stamps are done in always artichoke.

Otherwise I think I kept a lot the same - everything is edged in mellow moss. The faux stitching is paper piercing with stitches drawn with white gel pen. I did my embossing with Versamark and clear EP, and I chose these gorgeous Delish brads that I've been hoarding. The flower is punched out with the 1 1/4" circle punch. I was trying to add more layers to the flower but in the end simplicity won out in this corner. That's my general rule: if I'm trying too hard to make something work, then I pull back and usually find the solution.