A Trio of Challenges--Cosmo, Sketch, and Color

Cosmo the crazy dog is now clean, having made it safely back from his trip to Petsmart for his bath. I'm sure they were glad to see him go! He always makes quite an entrance once I convince him to walk through the automatic opening doors. We must be quite a sight, me trying to drag a big dog who's almost crawling through the doors on his belly. He seems to think that if he makes himself small, the doors (or whatever scary thing is nearby--like the washing machine or the dishwasher) won't notice him. When we got inside, he jumped up against the counter so he was standing on his hind legs and managed to knock over a tiered display of business cards. They fell all over the floor and I was trying to keep him under control and pick up a million tiny pieces of paper all at the same time. They went to take him back to be bathed and when he realized I wasn't right behind him (since I usually accompany him to the "back" at the vet's office for any type of procedure), he tried to bolt, but no luck. Three hours later, I went to retrieve him and he looks so pretty, or handsome, I guess I should say, since he's a boy.

Now he's completely exhausted and I'm working on some stamping projects. I finished a card for both Beate's weekend sketch challenge and Kristina's color challenge. The colors for the challenge were Bashful Blue, Not Quite Navy, Old Olive, So Saffron, and Whisper White. They were pretty easy colors for me to work with.

I used Stemming From for the main image. I built the flower image by stamping different parts of the image with different color inks. I was able to incorporate three of the challenge colors on the flower alone. To fill in some of the white space on the image panel, I added a pair of brads, backed by a slightly larger cardstock circle.

I matched the flower image with a floral patterned paper from the Bali Breeze paper pack. The tone on tone pattern looks nice with the flower image. Since the upper left corner of the patterned paper panel looked kind of bare, I added a Bashful Blue photo corner.

I used the "thanks a bunch" sentiment from the Smart Cookie set in the current SU! mini catalog. It goes nicely with the clean, simple design of the flower.

Now it's back to work on my other stamping projects (swaps and stuff for Kitchen Sink's new release--yay!) . . .

Materials Used (all from Stampin' Up!):

Stemming From and Smart Cookie stamp sets, Not Quite Navy, Bashful Blue, So Saffron, and Old Olive Classic inks, Not Quite Navy, Bashful Blue, So Saffron, Old Olive, and Whisper White cardstock, 1/4" and 1/2" circle punches, photo corner punch, mat pack and paper piercing tool, white gel pen, Dazzling Diamonds, Old Olive poly twill ribbon, So Saffron brads, dimensionals