Inspriration comes from everything!

My entry to Freshly Made Sketches 227 challenge

This week’s sketch for #227

I was struck this week by some sort of an epiphany!  Lately I have rediscovered how much I love to color.  That discovery made me come to a never more evident theory of mine and that is:  Creativity is genius when it is inspired……not forced!  Don’t get me wrong.  I love using a deadline as an excuse to craft instead of doing some over do house chore as much as anyone.  But what turned on a big light in my head for me is that I was approaching these challenges, I do love to play in, all the wrong way!

I had been trying to use the sketch as my inspiration.  OK, first that sketch didn’t come out of my head.  It came from the designer’s head charged with this weeks challenge.  In other words this sketch is HER inspiration.  This week marks the anniversary of losing a member of our family.  So my personal thoughts have been with thinking about how, even though it was 3 yrs. ago, the loss of this person in our family is still very great!  It also was a week after I had just attended this years Scrapbook Expo so I had quite a few new craft toys I wanted to play with.  So I really didn’t think I was going to enter any challenges this week.  I just wanted to play and not be forced to have to spend my valuable “craft hours” making something that had rules attached to it.  I wanted to color with this!

This is one of my “Expo deals” I found.  It is a large stamp set that was $2.50!  I know, mind blown!  And…..here’s the other one from the same booth.

So that’s what it did.  I began the week stamping and coloring with my new toy’s!  YAY!  Once I finished coloring the rose buds, while self admiring my work I realized, these two rose buds reminded me of this week’s Freshly Made Sketch challenge.  WHOA!

Now to the card:

I started auditioning paper to mat the finished stamped image.  I’ve always loved pink with black and white so I chose this tiny dotted Swiss print.  Once I started playing with paper I knew I should now see if  MY inspiration would fit into this sketch and walla…. I think it did.

The card measures   5″ x 7″.  The dotted Swiss cardstock measures 4.5″ x 7″.  I felt like I needed something else so I just stuck a pink piece of 7″ by 2″ cardstock underneath the print and slid it under to the point I liked it.  The frame around the stamped image was created by taking two nested rectangle dies (the smaller inside of the next larger die) and cutting from black cardstock.  I had these two layered butterflies in a box of shapes and stuff that I keep that are extras that I always cut when I’ve created something I like with my Silhouette or small parts from die sets.  A lot of times when I’m making a card I have wished I had cut extra of something I had used on some other project.  Now, I always make extras.  That way you don’t have to drag out a lot of things just to make that one shape you need.

The final step was putting some dew on the roses with “Crystal Lacquer” and creating the simple sentiment with a stamp.  Thanks so much for taking a look.

Materials List:

Cardstock: Recollections

Stamps: Rose buds, “Forever in Time” Sentiment, Kaisercraft “Mini clear stamps”

Copic Markers: G21, 24, 26 R81,83 E70

Butterflies:  Silhouette

Crystal Lacquer