Gridlock

This week's Daring Cardmakers challenge is another in the Elemental Inspiration series, and this time it's Beckie's turn to choose the picture we draw inspiration from - she's chosen a wonderful Autumnal "Mood Board" style photo, full of warm colours and Autumn-themed images.
I loved the actual layout of all the little photos into one sort of frame and thought I'd have a go at using that as one of the (minimum of) three elements I needed to take away to make my own card, I also wanted to use the stars and of course the gorgeous colours.
It didn't all go quite to plan, but in the end I came up with this:

To begin with I used several Distress Inks, and a couple of other ink pads (for the blue shade) and swooshed them over a sheet of card to get an all over background that I liked - I cut down to size and adhered it to my card.
I also used a Prima Stars stencil with silver ink mixed into texture paste on another piece of card, then sprinkled glitter all over , shook off the excess and left it to dry.  As you can see, none of that made it onto the card!
My plan was to make a "printer's tray" style frame, based on Beckie's image to lay over the top of the coloured background, using some of the star piece in some of the holes, and use a sentiment sentiment in one of the holes as in the photo.

I made a template for the frame and cut it on my Cameo.  I sat it over the inky background and it looked awful, I tried adding some starry pieces, but in reality the stars were too far apart  for this and didn't work at all.
I thought maybe there was too much black, so I re-did the template and cut the new one in white to make a double-frame

It still looked wrong, so I ditched them!  Maybe I'll  think of a way to use them, but maybe they'll go in the bin.
So what to do?
In the end I cut down the front of the card, turned it over and drew the LO plan of the grid on the reverse, then cut up into the smaller pieces,  After inking the edges I glued them onto a new card blank - even them in wasn't right as although I'd carefully numbered all the rectangles before cutting them out I must have had a brain-freeze because the panels were all wrong.  Sometimes you just have to go with it, so instead of being in the original inky pattern the design is more random!
Instead of filling the "holes" with stars or whatever as planned - and having no holes now anyway, I made another inky piece using the same colours as before and randomly cut the stars using a Taylored Expressions Nested die set, and arranged them in a sort of star-burst over the edges of the tiles.  I punched a few small stars from the left over inky card, and some glittery gold card for highlights.

So, quite a lengthy process for what is really a simple card - I just don't want you getting the idea that this was as quick and easy as it looks! haha  This one was painful!
Oh, I nearly forgot to show you Beckie's picture:

The BLOG looks amazing with all the Autumnal themes this week, I hope you'll take a look and maybe join in with us - we have a rather nice give-away on offer this time :)
Anyway, thanks for sticking with it and making it through to the end!  Please leave a message....