are CAS and grunge fundamentally impossible to combine?

seeing as CAS stands for "CLEAN and simple" it would seem so, wouldn't it? and yet i think you'll agree that, in the laurniverse, the card you are about to see is about as minimal as any i've ever made in my whole entire life. which ought to count for something, surely? but why does the question even arise... especially HERE, of all places? if you've guessed that there's a CAS-related challenge at shopping our stash this week, you're headed in the right direction! in fact, july 12th is national simplicity day, so we are paring down to just the essentials. which i think you'll agree i have actually done fairly successfully.

in the spirit of full disclosure, i have to admit that i somewhat cheated. because whereas i can recognize and LOVE a very minimal design when i see it, i have a hard time coming up with one on my own. so i decided to find an awesome CAS card and try to recreate it. i picked this card by an SCS member called biggan, and i stayed fairly true to the original. i even used a PLAIN WHITE BACKGROUND and stamped my sentiment right on the plain white background. which is how i lost the "clean" from "clean and simple". because i used a new set of woodmount alphas in a typewriter font that i absolutely love. and when i stamped them on scratch paper they came out beautifully clean. but... (you can see what's coming here, can't you?) ...when i stamped on my actual card i got a big honkin' black mark. i could have just started over. but i wanted to see what would happen if i added a few more black marks, and a tiny bit of distressing, to the design. so i added the 2nd and 3rd impression from all the other letters to the area around the sentiment, and the 2nd and 3rd impressions from several ink-ups of my favorite texty background stamp to the area underneath the hearts, to which i'd already added a little bit of crackle embossing paste, just to get some texture on here somewhere. so i'm not sure it's still CAS... but i think it's still simple?

you may --or may not-- be wondering where the hearts came from; but since they involve the stamping that qualifies me for the current retrorubber challenge (#66: going to the chapel: make a wedding card) i'm going to tell you, lol.

when i was designing the garden friendship book, for one of my july/august paper anthology classes, i tried out a lot of ideas using a beautiful tim holtz cling stamp set called "garden flowers" which is from either last summer or the summer before (2015, i think; but i'm honestly not sure!). a couple of the techniques involved smooshing together a few of my favorite shades of colorburst (peony and wisteria for the flowers; pthalo and turquoise for the leaves) on watercolor paper, letting it dry completely, then stamping the flower outlines on top to achieve that really loose watercolor stamping look i love.

in the end, i had several extra panels that didn't work for the book, but were much too pretty to toss away. i've used a couple in various ICAD collages, and for the remainder, i traced heart shapes onto the back of the panels, cut them out, and machine stitched them to the card. which brings me full circle, to my original question: is a card still CAS if you've grunged up all your elements??

meanwhile, my dearest SOS dt darlings have made beautiful cards that are clean AND simple, and i'd love for you to go marvel at their skill!!! ♥