This week’s Pals Paper Arts sketch challenge is by the very talented Pixel Maven herself, Nicole Watt.

I came up with so many ideas for this sketch, but I’m at a craft retreat with only a small subset of my stamping supplies, so my options were more limited than usual. I hope to explore the other ideas later on. But I do like what I was able to come up with today.

My main inspiration for this card came from the flourish in the Everything Eleanor stamp set. I thought it approximated the sketch’s diagonal banner nicely. I stamped the flourish and the sentiment (from the And Many More stamp set) in black Memento ink directly on the DSP. The DSP seemed to absorb the ink so that it wasn’t entirely black. To remedy that, I stamped over the images multiple times to make them darker. How? With my Stamp-a-ma-jig – a tool that every stamper should have!

For the two other shapes, I used two of the flowers in the same stamp set. I stamped them with the same ink on Very Vanilla card stock, then fussy cut them with (you guessed it) my Paper Snips. I embellished the centers with Pearl Basic Jewels, then attached them with Stampin’ Dimensionals.

Everything Eleanor stamp set

The images of this elegant stamp set required an equally elegant paper. Enter the Timeless Elegance DSP. It has only three colors: Very Vanilla, Sahara Sand, and Basic Black. Elegant indeed! By the way, the background of the full card photo is another sheet of the same DSP.

Timeless Elegance Designer Series Paper

I hope you’ll try this beautiful paper. At least find someone who already has it so you can look at it in person, because the photo does not do it justice. (That can be said for all the DSP – it’s much more spectacular in person than in photos.)

One more thing: for the proportions to look right, I made a 3-1/2″ x 5″ card instead of the usual 4-1/4″ x 5-1/2″. The images seemed to get lost on the larger card.

Here’s what I used:

Thanks for stopping by today, and Sweet Stamping!