Ribbons and Bows!

Aloha, all!

     The Stampin' Up! Only Challenge that begins today asked us to feature projects with Stampin' Up! Ribbons and Bows.  Now, any of you who follow my blog regularly know that I just LOVE to "tie my projects together with ribbon"!  This project, though, had to feature ribbons and bows for starters – they're supposed to be headliners, not just an accent to bring eveyrthing together at the end.

     So, for today's card, I put the ribbon on FIRST, and then tried to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of the card.

     Almost from the first time I used the new Stampin' Up! Chevron Border Punch, I wondered how I'd weave some ribbon through it for an accent.  So the actual first step in this card was to punch the border on the Crumbcake Card Base THEN to add the ribbon.  I tried a few different ways that would allow me to have a tie at the end, and I ended up pretty pleased with the result.  (There will be more experimenting with this, though!)

     Once I had that Cherry Cobbler Chevron Ribbon running through the Chevron Border, it seemed natural to try to find some other "pointy" objects to complement the Chevrons.  For better or worse the only Designer Series Paper (DSP) that's current that has Cherry Cobbler in it (outside of the paper stacks, which have ALL the colors) was one of the new Christmas papers, Season of Style.  Now, I'm not yet in the mood for Christmas!  But there's nothing that requires that we use Christmas colors just at Christmas time!  Unless it has a Santa or Christmas Tree or such, I feel quite free to use papers whenever I wish. 

     So the paper was the second part of my card.  It's definitely a different way to design a card for me, from the bottom up!  Now what to do?  I decided to cut the paper so that the width fell along the same left and right point as the ends of the Chevrons that I'd punched, and the height was about 1/8" from the top of the card to 1/8" from the top of the Chevrons.  Once I got that paper adhered to the card, the rest of the design came pretty quickly.  I noticed the piece of Cherry Cobbler DSP in the same Season of Style set with the plaid design.  So I cut a 1" width of that and notched both ends.  To add a bit of the Old Olive color, I picked one of the designs from the Old Olive Paper Stack papers.

     I went through my stamp sets with greetings on them, and picked the "hello" from the Four You Stamp Set.  I've seen quite a few Stampin' Up! designers using a variety of punches to frame a sentiment, so I picked out the Extra-Large Oval Punch and the Decorative Label Punch for this element of my card.

     At this point, I considered my card done.  But, when I photographed it and looked at it on my computer, I felt that it needed something – just a little something – as an accent.  Tap, tap, tap, went my fingers.  Nothing was working for me – until I remembered that the SUO Challenge theme was ribbons and BOWS!  Stampin' Up! has the nicest little bow attached to the cutest little paper clip in the 2013 Holiday Catalog, and I happened to have purchased a set of the Old Olive Simply Styled Embellishments earlier this month!  I snatched one of those little critters from its case, attached it to the greeting, and voila!  I ended up finishing my project with a bit of ribbon after all!

     I had a lot of fun with this challenge – I have a lot of fun with most challenges!  And I'm sure you'd have just as much fun with this challenge, too!  Just hop on over to the SUO Challenges Blog, check out the Design Team samples, and then link your own project to the challenge!  I'll be looking for your project!

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