This month Nichole issued a new kind of PaperTrey Ink challenge, but before I get to that, how about that cool flower? I love it! I was surprised by this flower because it is more realistic, and I'm used to stylized flowers in my PaperTrey sets. This one was SO down my alley--a great flower to color with my Copic markers! (All Copic markers that I used are pictured below. To get the highlight areas, you would use the clear blender to push ink out of the areas that you want to highlight.)
Back to the challenge part: this month PaperTrey is offering a card kit for the first time, so rather than just starting with just a prescribed stamp set, we also started with an exact list of cardstock colors and ribbon to use with the set. Since the colors were luscious, I didn't mind a bit. In fact, I learned long ago as a teacher, that the more carefully I defined an assignment, the better projects my students generally created. My pet theory on this is that when an assignment is wide open, a designer tends to spend far too much time noodling ideas and too little time on the actual execution of the idea. Suffice to say that we had plenty of time to spend on creating the card here. I can't wait to see what the other designers came up with using the same materials!
I also love the abundance of words with this set; I don't know about you, but I remember when I bought my first two stamp sets in 2000. I tried to chose sets that had great words as well as images. And who can't use a friendship set? This card is for a dear friend of mine in South Carolina. (I don't think she reads my blog, so she won't see this and get embarrassed.) When my dad had heart tests and a triple bypass surgery last month, this friend sat with my mom at the hospital--being a "surrogate daughter" in my place. . . Benjamin and I will be flying down to S.C. to spend a couple of weeks with my family this month, and this friend will pick us up at the airport and take us home. Don't you think she deserves a special card?
Be sure to see what the rest of the PaperTrey Ink design team came up with, and check out Nichole's post about the Friends 'Til the End card kit too! Thanks for visiting.
Niki Estes, Nichole, Mish Wooderson, Melissa Phillips, Lisa Johnson, Lauren Meader, Heather Nichols, Geny Cassady, Dawn McVey, Betsy Veldman, and Becky Oehlers
