I’ll be honest I created this background maybe 9 months ago, and never really liked it. The colour choices didn’t work for me, and it was too busy for my liking. That’s the great thing about experimenting, though, if we don’t try colour combinations that take us out of our comfort zone we never learn from the experience. In this case I love the stamp set (Sketched Bouquet by Simon Hurley) but I didn’t love the Nuvo shimmer powders I used.
I couldn’t bring myself to throw it out, though, even though it was unloved – and over the last few months I’ve noticed other designs just using a portion of busy backgrounds and got the idea to chop up the background for other uses. What was a very ugly (to me) background became three cards I’m pretty happy with overall … it’s a reminder to never give up on something, you just never know what its future holds.
Here’s the original background:
And here are the three cards I made out of it:
Here I used Plum Punch (and Ivory) cardstock and a happy birthday die by Gina K Designs – I ink blended the ‘happy’ die cuts with a bit of Plum Punch ink to dark it up slightly. The matte gold cardstock is from Tonic.
I’ve not very good at doing clean and simple cards, so this was a challenge – but I really loved the elegance of the finished card. I’ll add a small sentiment once I’ve decided what to use the card for. I used my Scor-pal to score lines down the sides, then once everything was stuck down I felt it was a bit plain, so I threaded a matte gold strip underneath the boxes and it just finished it off beautifully. I really like this one!
After I’d made the first card, I wished I’d thought of embossing the cardstock first – so I decided to do that with my final strip of the background, and I really like the effect. I kept the sentiment really simple this time around, and I’m pretty happy with the result of this one too. Amazing how different cards can look with just some small changes made to the design! Once again using Plum Punch and Ivory cardstocks and Plum Punch ink by Gina K Designs, and the sentiment is from the Beautiful Butterflies 2 stamp set, also by Gina K Designs. I used the Tin Tile embossing folder (retired) by Stampin’ Up!