After taking the Color Your Day class for my AECP Level 2, I was on the lookout for some colour combination inspiration! I finally got my hands on the gorgeous Calming Reverie and I couldn’t wait to get stamping it!

When I got back from a few days break on the Welsh Coast I was full of renewed energy, so I sat at my craft desk and put on the latest video from Altenew’s Youtube channel whilst I got to work and discovered the PERFECT inspiration in Nicole’s latest Sketch Starters. Nicole is also hosting Altenew’s Inspiration Challenge this month, so she had a colour palate, photo and sketch to inspire!

Two of the colours in this month’s challenge are two of my current FAVOURITES! They are both from the Sea Shore collection; Mountain Mist & Emerald, I don’t have the Altenew Grey suggested in my collection yet, so I substituted it with an embossing powder from WOW and an ink from Hero Arts.

I stamped this huge flower with the two Altenew inks; using Mountain Mist for the base stamp, then adding the detailed stamp in Emerald. (*Just as a quick aside, can you believe that, other than the stamens, this flower is only TWO stamps?!! I think it’s absolutely genius!!!!!)

I stamped the leaves using just a single ink, using second and even third generation along with double stamping, to get a variety of tones. (Second/third generation stamps just means stamping the image onto scrap paper once or twice, respectively, then stamping onto your project all without reinking.

I stamped both portions of my sentiment in Versamark and added British Summer Opaque EP; a matte grey, which as a Brit I can tell you is painfully apt and therefore utterly hilarious! I used the new Mega Label Love set for my sentiment and I absolutely adore it!! You will be seeing a LOT of this set!!

I also took some loose inspiration from Nicole’s sketch that is included with this month’s challenge; I think it is easy to fall into a bit of a routine when designing your layout, so using one of these sketches is a fantastic way to shake things up a little!

For example, my go to would be to place my flower into the lower left hand corner but looking at this sketch gave me a different idea! I was also inspired by Alex Syberia’s recent post showing the awesome texture you can get from taking a mini ink cube and swiping it directly over the paper.

I took both of these ideas to create the vertical panel seen in the sketch, then placed my flower in place toward the bottom of this swipe; this mirrors the square portion seen in the sketch, but in a very loose way. I added my sentiment strips once my flower and leaves were in place and added a few metal look stud embellishments.

I love the look of a clean white border around my card panels but sometimes this can get lost, so in order to show a differentiation between the panel and card base I swiped the same grey ink cube across each of the edges of the panel.