Inspiration Can Come From Anywhere . . .

It's Friday again, so it's time for another weekly blogger challenge project. This week's challenge was to find inspiration in something (a picture, a pattern, a clothing item, whatever) and create a project based on it. For this card, I was inspired by the Ikea catalog I recently received. Ikea is one of my favorite places to browse around. We're lucky enough to have one not too far away from our house. The store displays are always fun and funky with mixes of bold colors and patterns that I never would have thought of. And the prices are pretty good, too. Over the years, I've gotten to be an expert at decoding the picture-based directions to assemble Ikea stuff since I have so much of it at home.

This card was inspired by a picture that caught my eye in one of the catalog's layouts. I used the same color tones in the card as in the picture. I used the images from Vases in Vogue because the flower images reminded me of the ones in the picture.

The vase was stamped on vellum cardstock, then cut out. All of the images were colored with Twinkling H2O's, a sparkly, solid watercoloring medium, and an aquapainter. My local stamp store has the Twinkling H2O's in tons of fun colors. I've had these (and neglected them) for a while, so this was a good chance to use them. The vellum got a little curled after painting, but is a fun, translucent look.

The cardfront is a combination of brushed silver cardstock and Old Olive cardstock stamped with the On the Spot background. I tied a piece of eggplant ribbon around the seam where the silver and olive meet to pick up the purples in the flowers. Fun!

Please be sure to check out the other participants in this weekly challenge. You can find links to their blogs in the sidebar to the right. Since I'm working on a dial-up connection here at the beach, I'll have to wait until I get home later this weekend to see what inspired everyone else.

So far, I haven't made it to the beach yet. It was drizzling yesterday and overnight, we had really strong thunderstorms with lots of thunder and lightning. Cosmo was up in the middle of the night crying from all the noise. He's happy to be here, though, because there are a bunch of stuffed toys for him to play with. All of his stuffed toys have "disappeared" from our house because he's eaten the stuffing and had to have surgery to empty stuffing and other stuff from his stomach, so this is a special treat . . .

Materials Used:

From Stampin' Up!: Vases in Vogue and On the Spot stamp sets; Basic Black, Soft Sky, and Old Olive Classic inks; Basic Black, Elegant Eggplant, Old Olive, Whisper White, and brushed silver cardstock; Elegant Eggplant grosgrain; silver cord; sponge; aquapainter

Other: Twinkling H2O's