With a hey-nonny-nonny!

The theme over on the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge this week is "a mid-summer's challenge".  That's why I cleverly quoted Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the title of this post, from memory mind you, no googling here!  Except it turns out that I'm too clever for my own good and "nonny nonny" actually comes from "Much Ado about Nothing".  Oops!  Well, that play is set in the lush Tuscan countryside, so maybe it's still relevant :)  Anyway, setting my poor knowledge of Shakespeare to one side for a moment, my aim with this card was to bring in some of the colours of an English summer garden.  We get more than our share of rain here so green definitely had to feature prominently!  Why not enter the challenge yourself?  I'm sure if you can come up with all kinds of summer-related things you can do for your entry!  Remember, you could be the winner of a $50 voucher to shop at Simon Says Stamp!

I started with the stems and branches from the Spring Sprung stamp set, stamping a border around the edge of my card with Peeled Paint distress ink.  My card base was from the Kraft Core Shattered collection and colour-matched the ink perfectly.  The stitches were from the same stamp set and I used Archival Black for them.  The yellow pennant was cut from Tim Holtz's Classics #18 set, coloured with Mustard Seed distress ink and then cut to shape.

I absolutely love the typography of this sentiment from Tim's Random Quotes set, I really like designs that feature a lot of white space like this, and I made a conscious effort to mirror that feel in my design of the card itself.  I coloured the letting with a peeled paint marker and edged the sentiment with peeled paint ink.

Those of you who visit here regularly will know that I'm not one to make much use of embellishments, my asthetic tends to lean towards flatter designs.  On this occasion though, I thought this card needed a little something extra so I decided to make my own flower.  I stuck a strip of tissue tape to my craft sheet and then swiped it with barn door distress paint, left it for a second, then wiped off the excess with a tissue.  I removed the tape from the sheet and molded it into a rosette shape.  I used the same tape, coloured with mustard seed paint to create the flower centre on a custom fastener and cut some leaves from the same Kraft Core card as used as my card base.  Isn't it cool how the design on the cardstock suggests the veins on a leaf?

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!