All the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey

The theme over on the Simon Says Stamp and Show Challenge is "Leaftastic".  I just love Autumn, the changing colours of the leaves, the hint of a chill in the moist air and the start of "comfort food" season :)  I ordered a set of Tim's Autumn Blueprint stamps as soon as I saw them, I'm a sucker for anything leafy.  Most of my immediate family have birthdays in September (me included) so I thought I'd make some season-appropriate giftwrap.

My starting point was a roll of cheap kraft wrapping paper, which can be had for a handful of beans from your local Swedish furniture superstore (c'mon, don't play dumb, you know you know the one I'm talking about!).  The kraft colour is a perfect base for some autumnal goodness and it lends itself well to the hand-drawn feel of the stamped images.

The paper has a shiny side and a matt side, I chose to work on the matt side as I thought it would take the stamping and colouring better.  There are 4 stamps in the set, so I used large acrylic blocks with 2 stamps side-by-side on each, to make the stamping faster and easier to line up.  The images were stamped with black Archival ink, which is waterproof, useful as I went on to "paint" the leaves.

I dabbed various autumn-hued distress ink pads onto my non-stick craft mat and then used a water brush to pick up the colour and paint the leaves, blending colours together as I painted, to give that variagated autumn leaf colouring.

The co-ordinating gift card was stamped on Kraft Resist cardstock, painted in the same way and then I blended Aged Mahogany ink around the edges to complete the look.  I'm really pleased with the end result and the recipient absolutely loved their one-of-a-kind gift wrap!

 Supplies I used included:

InLinkz.com

Our ever-generous sponsor Simon Says Stamp is offering a $50 gift voucher as the prize again this week, just make something for the challenge and you could the winner! The winner will be chosen at random from those who enter the challenge, so why not give it a try? At the very least why not head over to the Challenge Blog to see how the other members of the design team have interpreted this weeks theme! :)

Don't forget, Simon Says Stamp have a great Facebook page too!  Check them out here!