Time to Bloom

Sorry it's been so long since my last post - the week got away from me and blended into a long weekend with too much going on to make it into the stamp room. I managed to make up for some of it today, but I'll post my creations one per day so I don't leave this blog hanging if I get busy again. I made this card to meet three challenges, though two of them are virtually the same so it's a bit of a cheat. The first challenge is from QKR Stampede, whose challenge this week was Wild West or Anything Goes. (As an aside, I'm thrilled to bits that my crazy cat yarn balls card got picked into the top 5 in QKR Stampede's challenge last week. It's a real honor and it will keep pushing me to stamp outside my comfort zone.)  Coincidentally, Go West was also the theme chosen for this week's splitcoast clean and simple card challenge. I took a somewhat unorthodox to the western theme by featuring blooming cactuses, and I stamped three of them to meet last weeks splitcoast's Ways to Use It challenge, which was all about 3s or thirds.

I started with a strip of whisper white card stock onto which I stamped three cactuses from the P.O Southwest Magna Stamp set from Clearbox using pear pizzazz ink and a wild wasabi marker with the thumping technique. I then used my stamp-a-ma-jig, melon mambo marker and a flower stamp from the Bella's Bloom set to stamp the large and small flowers. I used an aquapainter with crumb cake and soft suede inks to watercolor a sandy surface at the bottom and used the same technique with soft sky ink to create the sky.  I layered the whisper white strip onto a soft sky mat and distressed the soft sky layer edges with the SU distressing tool. I then added three pink gemstones to the centers of the large flowers for a bit of bling.

I used the wild wasabi and melon mambo markers to ink up the sentiment from the Bella's Bloom set and stamped it on a scrap of whisper white, which I die cut using framelit that coordinates with a Tim Holtz Sizzix coffee stamp set. The actual framelit is longer than I needed, so I simply moved the strip over and ran it through the big shot twice to get a shorter piece. I added a soft sky mat and freehanded the diagonal corners before distressing the soft sky edges.

Finally, I used the Wonderfully Worn background stamp and crumb cake ink to stamp the crumb cake card base. I then attached the image strip and the sentiment to the card base with dimensionals.

Recipe:

Paper: whisper white. soft sky, crumb cake
Ink: soft sky, crumb cake, soft suede, pear pizzazz, wild wasabi, melon mambo
Stamps: Bella's Bloom; Wonderfully Worn, P.O. Southwest Magna Stamp set from Clearbox
Accessories: Aquapainter, Stamp-a-ma-jig, distressing tool, Tim Holtz Coffee Time framelits by Sizzix, Multicolored Bling from Want2Scrap