Not much stampin' goin' on...

Hey, y'all! I know it's been ages since I posted. I've been busy with work and gum graft surgery earlier this month laid me up for a while. Tonight I'm excited to be going to the new catalog reveal party and I wanted to make some swaps, but I've been sick for the last week with a horrible cold. I really tried to get something together - there just wasn't enough time or energy for mass production today. So I decided rather than kill myself to make a bunch of simple card fronts, I'd step this one up a bit and post it here instead.

The idea for this card has been in my head for a long time and I just never had time to play with it. My daughter got a new water bottle for her school lunches and it used these colors with an embossed floral design. I thought those would make a great card and this is what I ended up with. The colors are Smoky Slate and Rich Razzleberry on Whisper White. The stamps that make up my handmade designer paper are from Simple Stems and Summer Silhouettes. Over that I added popped-up flowers from Flower Shop and a banner sentiment from Simply Celebrate. Just to add a bit more interest I embossed the slate background with the chevron folder and stuck those sweet candy dots in the flower centers. Considering all the floral elements I'm entering this card in the SUO Challenges flower challenge that's running right now - go check them out if you want to see some really beautiful creations from their team!

OK, I'm off to rest and recuperate a little before the big party tonight. I hope to be able to spend a bit more time stamping and blogging once I get my new catalog and my preorder goodies. Thanks for stopping by in the meantime!

Thoroughly Modern Madison

Good morning! I'm back with my second challenge for Our Creative Corner. Here's what I came up with:

My hubby would never go for this bedroom, LOL! But sometimes I think the modern aesthetic is just very cool so that's what I was going for. This is my card:

This is one of those cards that when I sat down to make it, I really had no idea what I wanted to do. I actually started out using a sketch challenge but in the end I changed the layout completely because it just worked better this way. Since I have such good timing, I finally broke out the Madison Avenue stamp set that was recently available during Sale-a-Bration. Yeah, I didn't stamp too much during SAB. But these images spoke to me as a way to create some modern patterns with these bold colors (Raspberry Ripple, Island Indigo, More Mustard, and Soft Suede). Thanks to the Stamp-a-ma-jig the two background panels came together fairly quickly. I tried to use the Madison Avenue flower for the focal panel but it wasn't working somehow. This flower from World Treasures pulled everything together and keeps the modern feel. I added tiny punched circles from the cupcake and owl punches to bring in the indigo and mustard colors. My texture comes from the embossed stripe background, the popped-up elements, and the indigo brad. For my sentiment I grabbed the retired set Pocket Silhouettes and one of the bitty banner dies - after I cut it out, I glued it onto suede card stock and cut around it to make a layer to match the rest of the card.

I hope you'll play along with this challenge - I will admit that it might not be an easy one, but isn't that the point of a challenge? :) Be sure you visit the rest of the team and give them some love for their projects too. Have a wonderful weekend!