Congrats, You're a Star

Hey, everyone! Thanks for stopping in this evening. It's shaped up to be a beautiful day here, which made it kinda hard to come home and go to "work" again. *grin* But I'm glad I did b/c I'm pleased as punch with the two cards I made tonight.

While on vacation, I left Whitney with the lion's share of the work on a custom order that I took before I left. The customer is looking for a wide variety of cards to give to her grandmother as a birthday gift - a total of 21 cards in all! Since our variety packs have been our biggest sellers (by the pack anyway), it actually turned out to be a great opportunity to develop more designs. I must say that Whitney did an AWESOME job while I was gone and made some really, really FANTASTIC cards - 19 in all!

So tonight, I'm sharing with you one of two that I am contributing to the pack: a congratulations design. Since we haven't had much time to participate in many challenges lately, I thought it would be a terrific opportunity to go searching for one or two for inspiration for this design. And I had no trouble finding a few to spur the creative juices.

I began with the layout, where I turned to this week's Sweet Stop Saturday Sketch 109 (w/ a spin!). The simple design made it easy to have the sentiment take center stage. Next, I needed a color scheme, and when I saw this week's Embellish Color Trends Tag Challenge, I knew that it would be absolutely perfect for what I had in mind.

With both sketch and color scheme firmly in hand, I set about trying to figure out how to make it all work. For me, the hardest part was figuring out how to make the pale, dusty pink work with such an overall masculine color scheme. And that's when it hit me: make it a small accent color. And *voila* that also solved the dilemma of how to make the center tag w/ its cute star punchout not disappear into the background. Two birds, one stone - me likey!

The other elements just fell into place. I knew I wanted the darkest color to serve as the backdrop for the whole design. And I liked the lighter blue as just the *pop* of color in the center. To draw one's eye to the focal panel, I chose to pop it up. Getting those lovely little tags to line up was no easy fete, but I managed to make it work ... somehow. (Now I know why I generally only use one of those at a time!) HINT: it never hurts to use a pop dot or two if you want tags to both pop out & stay put! When I was all finished, I felt like the card was still missing a little something. So I lightly misted it with GlimmerMist. Perfecto!

You wanna hear a funny confession?? I didn't even see "the spin" on the sketch until after I was composing this post! Awesome how it accidentally I totally intended to make it a masculine card and that it just so happened to give me the "spin" I needed! *snicker*

Thanks for stopping in this evening. Drop back in tomorrow for my second card!