Beautiful You

Today is VLV day week 4 for August.  Here's the sketch we had to play with and the inspiration photo I chose.  This week Amber chose inspiration photos from The Pottery Barn.

I found some older K & Co. dp that was a great match to the bedding shown in the photo.  Based on the sketch, I knew I wouldn't have a really large space for an image, so I decided to stamp Beautiful You from the Verve set "Beautiful You" and then fill the rest of the space with embellishments.

I thought I'd try to do a more shabby chic approach on this card.  The finished card is 6" square.  I distressed the edges of all of the dp and the matting papers and also did some zig zagging with my sewing machine.  I opted for a wider zig zag on the red paisley base panel and a narrower zig zag for the middle and top layers.  I strayed from the sketch a bit with the 3 dots.  I laid out different kinds of flowers and I really wanted a ribbon, so I was just about to adhere the 2 flowers and ribbon and it still just didn't look quite right.  I thought what it needed was either some lace or a punched border edge, so I added a strip made with a MS punch and used Vintage Photo distress ink on the edges.  Then I added the 2 Prima cameo roses and the 1.25" white May Arts silk ribbon tied with a Bow Easy. 

I really like this white ribbon.  It's not a stark white, and I've found I can use it with both white paper as well as a light ivory paper as I did on this card.  For reference, the mats behind the dp are the light ivory paper and the MS punched strip was done on white paper.  I didn't ink the center of that strip, so I think you can see how nicely it works with both of those colors.  I'd ordered some of the ivory May Arts silk ribbon as well, but that particular ivory is (to me) a darker ivory, what I'd call champagne.  I auditioned an ivory silk ribbon on this card, but that bow will just have to wait for another day to be used as I thought it was just too dark for this card.

I had a bit of a panic situation while making this card this morning.  I went to grab the ribbon out of my ribbon drawer, and it was gone.  I'd just picked up my work space pretty well yesterday, so I couldn't figure out how I'd managed to not put my favorite ribbon back in its proper place.  I hunted and hunted through my other ribbons.  I finally took all of the ribbons out and sorted them - no white silk.  Ugh.  I'd just ordered 10 yards of this ribbon and haven't used very much of it yet.  Finally, an hour later, I realized that I had put it out on the guest bed (adjacent to my craft space) with the scraps of BG "Capella" papers that I'd been using earlier in the week so that all of those supplies would be together and ready to go for a future project.  Whew!  Well, I guess the good part of all of this is that my ribbon drawer is now neatly organized with ribbons wrapped up on the spools again.  That is definitely a job I would not have tackled anytime soon had it not been for my "missing" silk ribbon. 

If you have never participated in the VLV challenges over on SCS, I highly recommend trying them.  If you complete all of the monthly challenges, you'll be entered to win a prize the following month.  I was the lucky winner for July 2010 in the random drawing, and my prize is the entire new release of Verve stamps coming out tonight!  I can't wait for them to arrive after seeing all of the great sneak peaks by the Verve Divas this last week.

Enjoy your day and thanks for stopping by!
Sarah