Garden Whimsy

Today's card is a card that I did for another stamp group that I belong to. We have weekly challenges where you do a 1-on-1 card swap with an assigned partner and theme. For this challenge it was called, "Challenge Your Partner" and what you did was sent your partner an assortment of card stock & embellishments and they were to create a card with what you sent. We could use any stamp sets/inks we wanted but we had to use the stuff our partner sent us to make their card and send it back to them.

I really laughed when I opened the envelope with the stuff my partner had sent me. She included a note about how she had bought the "clear" buttons from SU ages ago and had never used them and she needed me to convince her that she still needed them! - What's funny about that is that I too bought those same clear buttons ages ago and have never used them!!! Talk about a challenge. On top of that she sent me colors from the Rich Regals color family which has long been my "least" favorite of all the SU color families so here again was yet another challenge for me. Since we could use whatever stamps we wanted I chose to use my new Garden Whimsy stamp set and the new Sanded background stamp (Gotta love that one).

My card base is Elegant Eggplant followed by a layer of So Saffron stamped with the Sanded background stamp in Always Artichoke ink. I stamped the large butterfly with Eggplant ink on Confetti White card stock and punched out the corners with the Ticket punch, used my Color Spritzer to add some saffron highlights and then layered this to a square of Eggplant that was distressed with the Cutter Tool kit and added the 4 Saffron brads she had sent. I stamped the same butterfly again but this time cut it out and embossed it using my Versamark ink pad & Iridescent Ice Embossing Powder. They I layered this on top of the other image with dimensional tape.

I took the piece of Always Artichoke card stock she sent and cut a strip to go across the middle section of my card and distressed this as well then sewed along the edges with white thread. Then I layered a smaller piece of the Confetti white card stock & wrapped two pieces of Eggplant grosgrain ribbon around it. I stamped the bug image with Artichoke ink on Confetti white card stock and glued down my square button (my partner gave me a choice between the large square and large circle buttons so I picked the square for my card.) I lined up the button holes on my image so they would look like part of the ladybug as tying thread threw it just didn't look right to me. Then I layered that to a piece of the Saffron card stock and glued this down on my card. The sentiment was stamped in the right hand corner with Eggplant ink and I hand drew my bug trail with an Eggplant marker.

Over all I was happy with the results and I did challenge myself to use colors & embellishments that I normally wouldn't. I just hope my partner likes the results as well.