Best is Yet to Come for FabFri68

This week’s FabFriday sketch gave me every reason in the world to showcase English Garden Desinger Series Paper – I almost instinctively reached for it the moment I saw the sketch.  I paired this beautiful paper with Best Thoughts, one of the stamp sets you can purchase at a discount with Stampin’ Rewards.  These two come together perfectly in this clean and layered card:

And here’s Mindy Backes’ sketch for FabFri68 that inspired my card:

Tips, Tricks and Reminders

• Enough White Space.  English Garden Designer Series Paper paints a beautiful backdrop of flowers on this card front.  With all the colors and patterns there, I knew I’d have to make sure my focal square was rich with white space.  The 2-1/2″ square of Whisper White gave me just the space I needed.  I didn’t center the sentiment in the square – I dropped it down a snidge (that’s a technical term) to accommodate the butterfly that would soon be landing on the corner of the panel.
• Painted Butterfly.  I tried a couple of coloring techniques with this butterfly and liked my Blender Pens best.  I stamped him with Soft Suede ink on Hello Honey cardstock.  Before the ink dried, I colored in the borders of the butterfly (around the spots on his wings and along his body).  I allowed the Blender Pen to pick up the Soft Suede edges to give it a light coloring.  Once the ink dried, I cleaned off my Blender Pen and colored in the spots, careful to not pick up the brown.  The pen lightly transformed the depth of the Hello Honey.
• Color Combination.  I’m not a big fan of Hello Honey (there, I said it), but I have to admit that I love, love, love it when it’s paired with Soft Suede and Old Olive.  What a gorgeous piece of Designer Series paper!  The colors in English Garden are delightful, but this combination is scrumptious.  If you like this combination, too, fee free to save this:

Stamp Sets:  Best Thoughts  Papers:  English Garden Designer Series Paper, Soft Suede, Hello Honey, Whisper White  Inks:  Soft Suede  Accessories:  Stampin’ Dimensionals

I hope you’ll pop over to the FabFriday site to see the cards by the design team members and to play along with this week’s sketch challenge.

Thanks for stopping by today!

Brian