it's a THREE-fer on TWO-sday!

yes, i have *three* blog posts today, if you scroll down you can see my guest DT post for the current retro rubber challenge, and below that, the fab project i made for the eyelet outlet blog this week! meanwhile here comes my regularly scheduled post for shopping our stash. this week's challenge might be a toughie for some of you hardcore stampers, because we don't want to see ANY stamping this week; instead we'd like you to, "cut and paste" by which we mean swap out your stamps in favor of diecuts or stencils or BOTH! c'mon... it'll be fun! here's what i made:

patterned paper and florals: prima; black and white tape: scotch; leaf stencil: penny black; distress ink: shabby shutters and peeled paint; label die: nestabilities by spellbinders; black glossy cardstock: ranger; machine stitching uses coats and clark heavy duty upholstery thread in black and the highest number of stitches-per-inch on my sewing machine; adhesives: elmer's brand gluetape, 3m foam tape, gluedots

i happen to love stencils and diecuts, so i've got both on my card. the former involves my favorite leaf stencil and a few shades of green distress ink; the latter uses one of the many label shape nestabilities, which i still consider to be one of the best papercrafting tools of all time! i've incoroporated both halves of the current fusion challenge into my card, because heck, they're both pretty awesome, right?

since i knew i wanted to place everything according to the sketch, i made a few light marks where my focal point/label would go and then started stenciling the leafy background to emerge from behind it. the plain leaves definitely had great shape and color, and they resembled the inspiration photo quite nicely, but there was something missing. i mention this because i think it might help anyone who is longing at this point to grab their stamps; the thing that i thought was missing was definition... so i added some outlines, by machine stitching around one set of the leaves and adding veins to the other. you could also do this with a pen if you don't like to sew. either a plain outline, or faux stitching would work!

to give the leaves even more interest, i borrowed a trick from hand-lettering, which is to add a drop shadow to one side of each letter, or in this case, to one side of each leaf. i use a grey tombow brush marker for this; at the moment my favorite shadow color is N60, which is just the right color and intensity of blue-ish grey, imo.

there are lots more beautiful "cut and paste" creations from the design team over at SOS. do stop by and check those out, won't you, darlings?! ♥