grungy monday #04 little red dress inspiration

Happy Saturday, my friends. Seems like we're in for another gray day, although I did see some sun peeking through for about five minutes, so maybe that's a sign of things to come.

I struggled this week coming up with an idea for a card for grungy monday, a weekly challenge celebrating the products and techniques of Tim Holtz, presented by Linda Ledbetter of StudioL3. This week's challenge technique is found here. I was pretty sure that I wanted to use the woodgrain texture fades, but I just didn't know where to go with it. Then late last night, the inspiration challenge for today was posted on SCS. I went searching through the selected web site and found this darling little one in a red dress sitting in a wonderful old grungy setting, and inspiration hit.

Using a piece of ivory cardstock, my woodgrain texture fades embossing folder and walnut stain distress ink, I ran it through my cuttlebug to get a grungy old board, to which I added some fired brick sponging and vintage photo distressed edges.

I was thinking of putting just one large flower on, but didn't seem to have a stamp for what I had in mind. While searching for just the right stamp, I came across an old SU set called petal prints, which has always been a favorite, but hasn't seen ink in a long while. I pulled out my favorite flower in the set and stamped it nine times with fired brick distress ink and then roughly cut them out (yep, 9 flowers!). I then crunched them all up to get lots of wrinkles and dimension. Then I sponged just the ends of the petals with aged mahogany ink. I stacked them in threes and added black brads in the center to hold them together. I've never used this flower in quite this way before, and I love all the texture that resulted from crinkling up the cardstock.

I decided to put stems on the flowers, so I just cut those by hand from artichoke cardstock. The leaves are also cut freehand. I added some veins with black marker and sponged the edges with vintage photo. I glued everything in place and added a piece of raffia.

After I took photos and was preparing to post one, I realized that the leaves were just too smooth and neat, so I took a pointy pair of scissors and roughed up the edges -- big improvement.

The flowers aren't quite the color I envisioned, but my supply of distress inks is rather limited, so I went with what I had.

Thanks for stopping by today. I hope you have a blessed Easter tomorrow.