You Gotta listen to Da Coach!

Sorry everyone for that little bit of Chicago local flavor Mike Ditka reference in the title. I'm not actually going to talk about football today. The coach that I was talking about is Stampin' Up!'s color coach. This little $9.95 purchase can save you lots of aggravation when you're looking for just the right combination of Stampin' Up!'s colors. And, as my friend Liz tried to show me last night, you can use it as a bit of a crystal ball too. You see, Liz sometimes closes her eyes and gives the color coach a spin -- whatever color her finger lands on she uses as a starting point of her card.

So last night using this method Liz landed on Green Galore. Unhappy with her first "fortune" she tried again and guess what? Yup, Green Galore again. Thinking the third time was going to be the charm she landed on Pixie Pink. I kept telling her she should have listened to the wheel the first time -- the wheel is never wrong, but she stuck with the Pixie Pink. Well, I really liked the design she came up with, but it didn't make Liz's final cut. I kept thinking if she had just listened to da coach, it all would have turned out differently!

Well, I'm not one to want to offend the color coach forces, so when I got home I decided to use Green Galore in my card. It wasn't a difficult decision, actually, because the color went very well with my card design. This is one of the cards for my Clearly Delightful Acetate Techniques class and the technique used here is stained glass window. The flowers in a cup are actually stamped on acetate in black stayz-on ink and colored on the reverse side with my Bic permanent markers. Since my marker color choices were pretty bold, it seemed right to use card stock from the bold brights family.

I confess I don't use bold brights very often, but I love how this card turned out. I even like the little faux brads made with the 1/8" handheld circle punch. They're a bit of a pain to adhere (I used 2 way glue), but they look so cute! I would have used my brilliant blue brads, but since I failed to plan far enough in advance, by the time I put the card together I realized I would not have enough brads to give each student 8. But hey, faux brads are a technique too, so my card techniques students just got a bonus!

For anyone who likes to know these things, the card stock is brilliant blue, tempting turquoise, pink passion, green galore and whisper white. The only ink used was black stayz-on and the Bic permanent markers. I also used the coluzzle cutting system for the circle mat (for a circle this size you could also use the round tab punch -- just punch once, rotate 90 degrees and make sure everything is lined up and punch again) and the word window punch for the sentiment, as well as the 1.8" handheld circle punch for the faux brads. The panel with the main stamped image is adhered to the white panel underneath with dimensionals.