The Card Concept - Pastel Party

Hello Everyone!  It's time for the next Challenge for The Card Concept, "Pastel Party".  Lately, I have been playing a lot with the Wreath Builder Templates from Gina K Designs for both square and A2 sized card panels and making lots of different styles of wreaths for all seasons.  For this challenge, I decided to try to do a pastel wreath for a Christmas card!  This is a great way to use some of those small images that we all have in stamp sets!  Look through your stamps to see what small images you have and you'll be surprised at how many will work with the Wreath Builder Templates.  A lot of it is trial and error to find what looks good and what doesn't.  We have a great line-up with the design team members so be sure to stop and visit everyone's blog!  Here are the links:

Tangii Crain

Vicki Finger (You are here)

Julie Gearinger

Michele K. Henderson

Kim Lackenbach

Nancy Penir

Susan Powell

Maureen Plut

Angel Rivera

Mackie Robertson

Marcie Sharp

Pam Staples

I used four colors of ink and a few Stickles for this card.  Sweet Blush, Aqua Mist, Autumn Rose and Vintage Jadeite.  The Stickles were Pink.  The stamps I used were from WPLUS9 Be Merry Florals, Papertrey Ink's Enclosed Bell, and Papertrey Ink Happiest of Holidays for my Sentiment.  I actually really love this card and another I made for a little gift card.  

Slightly larger images can work if you think through them beforehand.  While this wreath is more asymmetrical, it still worked out great for a kind of wreath although it is not as busy as some of the others I've made.  I still have a few more variations to try this week (hopefully).  I would encourage you to play on some scrap paper or cardstock before actually trying them on your good cardstock the first time or two.  

One thing that is super important when using the wreath builder templates is that you must always start in the square orientation, not the diamond.  There's a lot of little tips and tricks that you can find in Stamp TV YouTube Videos and also Jennifer McGuire and Cathy Zilske have done a few as well.  There's probably many more out there but I don't have a lot of time to watch too many. The link above is to the wreath builder Tutorial for how to stamp for panels which will be 4 x 5.25 to fit in the template but still be mounted on an A2 Card base.  Here are a few samples I've done.


It just takes a bit of practice to get the hang of the "oval" wreath orientation and you can't get in a hurry or else you will really mess it up.  The Thanksgiving card I posted below was stamped the same way but when it came time to add the acorns, I took the template out of my Misti and Just lined it up to be centered then rotated my panel 180 degrees and stamped it again so that whichever way it ended up on the panel would work out okay because I had kept the symmetry.  I hope that makes sense.  I like how well the Thanksgiving theme card worked out and I would only change a few things about it.  Since it was a trial run to see if it would work, I was happy with how it turned out and it was the basis for today's card for The Card Concept.

I am still so busy with the new house.  It's not like I'm actually doing the work but we had a lot of upgrades that were not done when we closed.  I spend my days chasing stuff down trying to pin down dates for completion.  Absolutely nothing ever gets finished the first time and often one contractor messes up another's work and I am the one who is cleaning up each and every mess.  Let me just say, there were many extenuating circumstances that we needed to be moved, but you should never close on a house before it is completely finished.  And if I wasn't on top of everything, every single day, nothing would ever get finished.  We have part of our sod, but all of the hurricanes have left many of the sod farms unable to be accessed.  In addition to that, we are still waiting on plans for our additional garage and landscaping.

The happy news is that all of my beautiful flower bulbs will be delivered today in preparation for planting.  I got 12 different varieties of  Daylilies that are re-bloomers in colors from Pink to Coral to Purple and also a Bethlehem Sage Ground Cover that flowers.  Until the rest of our landscape is put in place, we won't plant anything else which at this point.  Hopefully next spring that will be finished and we will be able to decide what, if anything else we want to put in.  We do have a Jasmine bush that absolutely loves it here in Texas and has bloomed continuously since we moved it here at the end of May.  But we're going to have to move it to the ground or a larger pot soon.

Thanks so much for stopping by today and I hope you'll have time to join us with a project of your own.