Rustic Rooster

When I saw this hostess set in the Stampin' Up catalogue (Country Morning), I fell in love with it. Now that I don't need to save sets for give-aways anymore, I could very selfishly ink this up for myself! The inspiration for this card came from the yellow polka dot panel - I was half-heartedly trying to tidy things up and I found this scrap at the top of the pile. I thought that I would turn it into a card rather than put it away, so I rummaged through the rest of the trimmings and found the veggie strip (with red gingham on reverse), brown and olive bits. With all these treasures in hand, it would have been wrong to keep tidying so I turned them into a card. All these rustic papers called for this rooster image, which is stamped on vanilla and coloured with pencil crayon. I wanted to keep the lines showing so I didn't blend it. Roosters have lovely glossy plumage (at least they do in my imagination), so I added some scattered straw distress stickles to his tail for some sparkle without glitter. The buttons are PTI coconut shell rustic buttons, with some linen or jute twine in them. The sentiment at the bottom was bolder looking in my mind's eye, but once it was down (after whole card finished), it was too late to do anything about it. I'm a bit of a kamikaze stamper that way. (However, this trait has honed my skills at peeling apart layers and hiding mistakes!) Anyway, the olive piece is the only other bit with stamping, where I used the scratchy stamp by Tim Holtz (Stampers Anonymous) in Forest Moss and rubbed in some more Forest Moss to deepen it a bit. I'm quite pleased with how this turned out. It doesn't show in the scan, but the front of the card is actually half an inch narrower than the back panel, and the red gingham is mounted on the back panel for an accent. I don't usually plan far enough in advance for this sort of thing, so I was feeling quite pleased that I thought of it in time to do it. Upon reflection, to be totally truthful, the yellow piece was a smidgen too short, so I was trying to solve that dilemma and stumbled on this as a solution, and it actually worked out quite well!

Stamps: Stampin' Up (Country Morning set), ink: India Ink (Memories), Forest Moss (Distress), Patterned Paper: Farm Fresh (October Afternoon), Cardstock: old olive, very vanilla, chocolate chip (Stampin' Up)