One More for St. Patrick, and Inspiration Challenge

First, housekeeping.  I figured out how I am going to take care of the backlog.  I have made some extra cards the last few days, and also am going to show a few older ones that I made earlier but haven't shown yet.  Not quite in the spirit of the original challenge, but at least I will have a card I made to show for every day so far this year when I finish catching up.  I am going to catch up by including 3-4 cards per post instead of 1-2, so that by the end of the month at the latest I should be back on track.

For March 17th, one more St. Patrick's Day card:

Just love this little girl!  She is another digital stamp from Pink Cat Studio (image copyright Pink Cat Studio).  I really like their style, simple images with bold lines that are easy to work with.  For this card I layered a piece of Honeycomb designer paper (Paper Adventures) onto an ivory card base, rounding the corners of both.  I printed the image (her official title is Lucky Betty, but I mentally think of her as Fiona because she reminds me of my niece!) onto green paper and again on white cardstock.   I colored the white image using the Prismacolors with Gamsol technique and glitter glued the three shamrocks.  Then I fussy-cut the image out, skipping the "antennae" and the pigtails, and used mounting tape to pop the colored image up over the green image.  I cut the headband shamrocks out and mounted them separately.  The parts of the original green image that show through then complete the picture.  I rounded the corners of the green paper and attached it to the card.  Finally I added a shamrock bubble sticker, an ancient item from my stash, to finish off this simple card.

Onto this weekend's Inspiration Challenge!  This week the inspiration was a German website, Johnny Tapete, which specializes in vintage wallpaper and other decor items from the 50s through the 70s.  If you like the bold prints from the 70s, this site is a visual feast!  I found inspiration for two different cards.

The first was inspired by this wallpaper:

The design immediately reminded me of a paper pad I recently found on clearance at Michael's, along with some coordinating stickers and die-cuts.  Using this image from a sketch challenge I missed two weeks ago,

I came up with this card:

All the papers, and the dimensional butterfly sticker, are from the K&Company Edamame line.  The construction of the card is pretty self explanatory, just a lot of cutting and trimming, and resizing and cussing, and a slight tweak to the challenge sketch to make it all fit, and then sticking everything in place.  The cool thing is that the coordinating papers, the woodgrain one and the green one, also have a very 70s feel and actually also match up to similar wallpapers at the website!  I am very happy with this card because I don't do a lot with big bold patterns and coordinating patterned papers with other patterned papers, and this turned out really well.  Using items from a coordinating line really helped me take a bigger risk than I might have otherwise.

Finally, I did a second card in a similar way.  Another wallpaper pattern jumped out at me:

It reminded me of another set of coordinating papers and stickers I had bought several years ago, right before my long crafting hiatus, and had never really used much.  I used another challenge sketch as the basis for a card:

And made this card:

The papers are all from S.E.I.'s Madera Island line.  The tree paper is the connection to the inspiration piece, as are the overall 70s feel of this color combo.  I changed up this sketch a little more, leaving out the circle element (though the round tree tops kind of suggest it) because no matter what I tried it was just too cluttered.  I also shrunk the oval down to a sticker that is meant to suggest a photo turn.  My usual impulse would have been to use brads in all 4 corners, so the sketch helped me stretch a little and try something different. I really like the way it turned out.  The stamp, which I have been using a LOT, comes from the Michael's $1 bin so I am definitely getting my money's worth out of it!

Thanks for looking, and have a great Sunday!