More is More

I had so much fun with today’s card for Taylor’s sketch challenge (Taylored Expressions Cupcake Challenge – cupcakes not required – get all the deets to play along over at Taylor’s blog).  The large center panel is big enough for a little scene.

I’ve been dying to play more with the stamps I got from Our Craft Lounge and the set I’ve most wanted to get inky is Dr. Pea-nut.  As you may already know I really hate clear stamps, but I will occassionally buy them when I love the images enough.  So when Joy first told me about OCL my first question was “rubber or clear?” and her oh-so-clever answer was “both!”  So some sets are available in rubber – very nice deeply etched on crafty cling – and some are clear.  I hesitated to get Dr. Pea-nut when I realized it was a clear set, but I just couldn’t resist.  I am thrilled to report that they stamp like a dream.  I didn’t have trouble with even one image and all I did was clean them with Stampin’ Mist on my scrubber one time before inking them up!  I’m a happy stamper!

It was so fun to build this little scene.  Marianne did such an awesome job with all the little elements to make this work – the grass with the flowers, the little sprigs of grass, the bucket of peanuts and even a separate little pile of peanuts!  All those little things made it so easy to put this together.  The OCL stamps (both rubber and clear) come on a storage panel much like Taylor’s SASI line, but the OCL panel is smaller.  Since OCL doesn’t have a container/binder yet, I checked the TE mini binder box and the OCL panels do fit – the holes are spaced the same.

My little scene was colored with Copic markers and the sky was sponged using the SU Cloud Template.  Normally I would choose a designer paper and then color my image to coordinate, but in this case I colored the image first and then was thrilled to find that SU Summer Picnic dp would work so well.  The image is layered onto Real Red with a scalloped punched bottom edge and some faux stitching around 3 sides.  That is layered onto Bashful Blue.  The ribbon is from my stash and I added 3 white American Crafts brads in the upper left corner and some golden brown liquid pearls along the scallops.  The Blue panel is then popped up on foam tape.  I really really wanted to use this sentiment so I added a little extra element of circles to the sketch layout.  The card base is Real Red layered with Old Olive run through the CuttleBug and layered  with the Summer Picnic DP.

Now let’s see what the rest of the Cupcake Crew has cooked up today:

…plus today’s Featured Stamper Cindy Haffner!

Also be sure to check out Our Friday Friend over at the SASI blog…and I forgot to mention that I had a card posted over there on Wednesday as well!

Happy Friday and have a great weekend.  I’m planning to knock out some more Christmas shopping today (I’ve accomplished a good amount this week) and hopefully complete some hand stamped gifts as well.  We still don’t have a Christmas tree…we’ll see what the weekend brings.  Thanks for stopping by.