Very berry mystical wishes

How wonderful isn't it that the new year has started? I hope you are as excited as I am. Can't wait to see all the new sweetpea releases and what I make with them during 2011. I hope you'll continue stopping by to see what I'm up to. I'm closing in on 200 folloowers and will have a candy when I do, so hopefully it's not long left...

The card I want to show you today is my first sweetpea for 2011. I made it primarly using a 3-part challenge:  colour/sketch/item, and let me tell you, it was a CHALLENGE. The colours were plum, blueberry and beige. Say what?! I've never played with that colourcombo so I started looking through my stash - there are always papers with any combo you're looking for, but not this one. I almost gave up, but stubborn as I am I got intrigued. So I realized I needed to whip up my own set of matching papers. I imidiately thought of this purple glittery one I had been saving. The blue and beige were harder as I don't use those colours much. I came across the dotty one which is the backside of a vintage charleston dancers paper. I also found the light blue with beige swirls and was quite proud at how I managed to match them up together.

The image I used is Ching chou kuik's dark sirene from plate 24 and the sentiment is from plate 46. I've never used her before, but knew she was right for this as soon as I saw her. I think it was the fact that her hair was dark that gives the card that extra "darkness" and leaves it more muted than it would be if I had coloured it blue. She is stamped with black ink and then I went over her hair with midnight blue promarker to make her hair agree more with the patterned papers. The rest of her is also coloured with promarkers. I added some glittereffects with a sakura gelly roll to the image, text and butterfly border. That pen is addictive! To make the white parts more yellow on both the image and sentiments I inked them with a distress ink. The different butterflies are made using Martha Stewart punches and the leaves are made using a quickutz die.

One part of the challenge was to use a recycled item so I made a little decoration from a bottlecap that I hammered on to flatten a bit. then glued on a circle from one of the patterned papers, filled with clear dimensional glue and filled with tiny see-through beads.

Challenges used:

Craftycreations - colour, sketch, recycled item
Creative inspirations - something new (all butterfly punches are new and image never used before)
Moving along with the times - birthday and circles
Simon says stamp - time to celebrate (with optional extra glitter)
Stamp challenges - glitter
Totally paper crafts - time to party