Initially

Hello

I've been a bit MIA this week - a long 'to-do' list, with quite a bit of crafting on it, but no time left for blogging or chatting!  It would be good to report that the list had more ticked off items than still-to-be-done items, but sadly, that's not the case! But I do need to get some blog-posts done, so let's see if I can cut the waffle!

It's new challenge day on The Daring Cardmakers and here;s the card I ended up with - I say "ended up with" because it needed a bit of a tweak to get it right

 

It's the First Friday of a new month, so it's an Elemental Inspiration Challenge this week. 

Our lovely Ruth has chosen this pretty set of pictures to inspire you with this time; you just  need to choose a minimum of THREE elements to use when you make your card.

Some suggestions to get you thinking: stars, flowers or petals, the 9 square layout, hand drawn patterns, twigs, sunset, handwriting, monogram, large letters, fur, woodgrain ..... lots of inspiration!

It's a while since I made anything with a monogram being an integral design feature, so choosing to use the large letter as one of my elements was easy, as was the lure of using some pretty flowers.  The third element had me stumped for a while, until I spotted the sunset in the square with the sentiment in it. Deciding to make an inky sunset background also meant my colour palette was also decided.

 Info:

I made the sunset background first, using watercolour card and several suitable shades of ink

Using the same colours I inked up a few small pieces of  card for die cutting my flowers later.

Next I chose a letter shape I liked (I always dither!) and on my Silhouette machine cut one in black and one in white to see which I liked best on the inked background.  Having decided the white looked best I cut 4 more of the letter, then glued them altogether.

matted the inked piece onto black card, and then the white card blank, die cut the flowers and leaves and used a ball tool to create the flowers.

The various vine shapes were cut into small pieces to entwine the monogram, then I arranged my flowers and added a few more vine and leaf pieces.

To finish I added some gems and pearls, and made three faux brads for the corner

All the flower and leaf dies I've used here are from Spellbinders

This is where it all went a bit wrong!  I didn't like the balance between the black and white areas, the decorated square looked just a bit too big for the card.  I wondered whether I could change it, but just in case it all went really badly I took some photos so I'd at least have something to share if it did!

See what you think of version 1

I didn't have a large enough black card so I matted some black card onto a larger white card blank, then carefully took the first version apart as best I could.  Some of the black mat was left behind so I trimmed the square down a bit, then matted onto white before adding to the new card blank.  I think the wider black border looks so much better and more balanced now.

Something like this would look great in a frame, don't you think?

Anyway, I should go - I sort of failed when it came to cutting the waffle, didn't I? hahaha

Never mind, I'll try harder next time ;)

Have a great weekend

Thank you for visiting - please pop across [HERE] to see how our DT took on this challenge!