Paper Players Sketch Challenge & Time Out Winter Challenge

 

I love sketch challenges - they help me when I'm stuck on a creative idea!  That was true with this cute stamp set - Forest Critters - the December Stamp of the Month from Close to My Heart.  I wanted to use the kraft base, but it was a little too much with the smaller animal images.  The sketch this week at Paper Players Challenge helped me see that breaking up that background would make it easier to get the scene I wanted.  Be sure to click on the red link so you can see the other amazing creations for this sketch on their blog.

I'm also submitting this card to the Time Out Challenge Blog with a Winter/Holiday theme.  The red link for Time Out will also take you to their website and you can get inspiration from the submissions to their challenge.

I created a mostly monochromatic card with the kraft base - I just had to add some green for the pine branches!  White embossing helped the sentiment stand out on the colored base.  I used an old bottle of white craft paint mixed with water to splatter the snow on the card.  I used Mocha ink on toffee cardstock (it's slightly lighter than kraft) for the forest critters, fussy cut them and then inked the edges with Espresso ink.  There was NO coloring on this card - making it pretty easy to put together.

I did cut the smaller kraft panel for the front and used low-tack tape to secure it to the card base for stamping.  Luckily, my stamp platform helped me since I needed to stamp the images several times to get the overlap areas to come through!  Then I mounted it on the white and was able to match up the stamped images.

Here's a look at the stamp set - and I think you can see that it's pretty versatile for not only holiday cards, but after the holidays as well.  Think of those thank you cards you need to send! 

Thanks for stopping by my corner of the blog world!  I hope you have a wonderful rest of the week.