Going Round and Round

This week's Etsy Inspired Challenge (EIC132) store is called Fresh Metal Jewelry and it features beautiful jewelry not of metal but of fabric. Really, these are quite equisite with hand-sewn flowers in a variety of different colors.

Since blue is my favorite color, it's no surprise I was drawn to this Blue Blossom necklace as my inspiration piece.

I decided to try a round card, so I just cut two of the largest scalloped circle die I own, and used a mini brad so the pieces will swing to the left and right to open the card. The flowers are clear-embossed to give a little of that tone-on-tone look of the inspiration piece.

Flower stamps -- Autumn Leaves

Sentiment: CTMH

Ink: Versamark and Memento Place

Accessories: Clear EP, McGill butterfly punch, mini half-pearls, mini-brad, and scalloped nesties.

Maybe I'm overthinking it

At first, I thought the color combo for the current Off the Wall Craftiness Challenge (OTWC49) was a little odd -- red, green and yellow (see inspiration photo below). Then I started looking around, and I saw the colors everywhere. Seriously, I was flooded with ideas that were all too complex and didn't work out.

I finally settled on this layout, courtesy of week's CAS challenge at SCS. And it also qualifies for the current Victorine Originals Challenge (#10) to use a circle on your card.

Ink: Kiwi Kiss

Dragonfly: Inkadinkadoo

Sentiment: Impression Obsession.

Supplies/tools Nesties and eyelet punch in two sizes to make the little flight path for the dragonfly.

Monochromatic music

I made this card for three challenges - the Sketch Challenge and Teapot Tuesday at SCS and Magical Monday. Teapot Tuesday's destination for this week's cards is a pre-teen girl who is undergoing treatment for cancer. Among her favorite things are music and the color blue, so it was pretty easy to decide the direction to go in. Magical Monday's challenge is to create a monochromatic card, so I kept it all blue.

The stamps are all from Club Stamp, including the sheet music, which is actually only a few lines that I stamped over and over down the page. The ink is Colorbox Chalk Prussian Blue. The finishing touch is silk flowers, which started out white. Sometime in the past I had sponged blue ink on them and that worked perfectly for the monochromatic theme.

Mixed media? Me? Really?

This week's featured store for the Etsy Inspired Challenge (EIC129) is called Desired Things, and it's a shop full of mixed media items such as jewelry. The artist uses fabric, beads, shrink plastic and other media, along with paint, stamping and other decorative items to create some very appealing and unusual necklaces, bracelets and pins.

Well, collage doesn't come easily to me, but this shop really inspired me to try something that is just the tiniest bit different. Using this lovely broach as inspiration, I started by brayering pink and lavender ink on glossy paper, then siver embossed the dragonflies. The purple panel is embossed with a script folder. The black strip is a piece of screening material left over from when we changed out the screens on the porch (I guess that's the "mixed media" part).

I used the layout from this week's Card Positioning System sketch (CPS208).

Dragonflies from Inkadinkadoo; sentiment from Impression-Obsession.

Going old school

This week's queen for the day stamper at SCS does lots of tearing on her cards. I learned tearing at the very first SU party I ever went to (the SU demo jokingly described it as a "highly technical" trick), and for I while I probably tore every piece of paper I laid hands on. That kind of fell by the wayside, and it was fun to have an excuse to do it again when I made this card.

In CASEing a card by Luv Flowers at SCS, I used the colors from this week's Off the Wall Crafitness challenge (OTWC48). This week Kim has us using the pretty pastels of pink, yellow and blue, and how can you go wrong with such springlike colors. They just called out for a sweet flowery card.

You can see the OTWC inspiration photo at right.