Challenge Entry

Hey All! Hope your week is progressing well! Today's post is super quick. I wanted to try the House Mouse Monday Challenge over at House Mouse Challenge. This is my very first time doing a challenge with them. You all know how much I'm loving the House Mouse stamps and I'm feeling a little more confident in my coloring abilities so I thought I would give it a shot. The challenge this week is "Let it snow". You are to use at least one House Mouse or Friends stamp on your card and this challenge you had to add snow. So here is mine:

Boy did this card take on a life of its own! Geeeez! I started out with the image stamped on white card stock and colored with colored pencils and OMS. Well, all coloring was completed accept for the tip of the second branch from the top on the right. I was using a blending stump and my dear, sweet little Gunther barked unexpectedly which caused me to jump and smear the color WAY out of the lines! LOL Little monster! My original intent was to cut the image out in a square, mount it, add a few flakes, and done. But Gunther changed all of that. So, not wanting to have to re-stamp the image and re-color it, I had to figure out a way to salvage it. So after much pondering, I came up with the idea of cutting the image out as close as possible which would eliminate the smear. Then I thought I would mount it on paper that I embossed with the CB snowflake embossing folder. OK, so far so good. Then I thought I would simply mount it on the white card add a sentiment and bow and be done. But it was way too much white so I added the green matting. It still kind of looked a little plain, so I got out my Martha Stewart glue pen and dabbed at all the embossed snowflakes in the background and sprinkled them with glitter. That looked better, but still it needed more. Got out the Stickles and dotted the tree with "berries". Looking better, but not quite there yet. Applied the liquid applique for more snow effect and pressed in glitter and heated it with the heat gun. OK, almost there. I had a hell of a time with the bow because I wanted to put it where I have it, but I needed something to tie it around. So I cut a thin strip of the green matting paper and a thin strip of card stock for stiffiness and tied the ribbon around that. The bow just didn't look right, so I added another strip of ribbon which I tied around the middle knot of the bow and cut it. Now it looks like a deformed octopus bow, but I was so done with this card by then. THEN I realized I didn't put any sentiment on it. So at the last minute I created the "Deck the Halls" sentiment on my computer using the Curlz font, cut it out, attached it with the "bend" to give it a 3-D effect (I've seen that on other cards and I like it a lot - see the up close pic below), added the bling and said "That's it, enough, I'm done!" I think that is why I don't do challenges, because I get my self in these tizzies over wanting it to be perfect.

Oh well, I don't think it turned out horribly, what do you think? You can see from this shot that I only attached the cut out image from the bottom leaving the top to stick out a little bit from the background to give it some depth.

Well there ya have it! My first House Mouse challenge. Or shall I say "mine and Gunther's first challenge". LOL

Thanks for stopping by! I'll have another post on Saturday for you. Can't wait till you see the one card I'm just about finished with. Until then, I'll see you all on your blogs!

Best,

Curt O'Brien

"God help me be the person my dogs think I am."