Aloha, all!
With a greeting such as, "Aloha," you have to know that I live in Hawaii. In fact, I live on the Windward Side of the Big Island, and it is green all over, including in our garden. It's really my husband's garden because he does all the work. I get to look out from our lanai and ooh and aah over it every day.
I also take photographs of it at least several times a week, as there's always something new that catches my eye and I want to capture the picture forever. And, yes, there are scrapbooks that have photos of our garden in them, and there will be more, I'm sure. But today I decided I wanted to use one of the photos in a greeting card. This is for the biweekly Stampin' Up! Only Challenge blog, whose challenge this week is to use a photo in a project using Stampin' Up! products. Yes, some of us created some fun scrap pages for this challenge. But I and a few others used our photos in other kinds of projects. You really have to go check them out! But here's my project first.
It didn't take a long time for me to go through my photos from this summer and find one that would be perfect for a "Get Well" or "Thinking of You" card. This Bird of Paradise plant flowers pretty regularly throughout the year, and is now in a spot where it catches the sun beautifully – and I get to see it from my kitchen window!
It also didn't take long for me to find Stampin' Up! colors that went well with the flower – Cherry Cobbler and Gumball Green. Cajun Craze picked up a bit of the top of the red base of the flower. But the Cherry Cobbler seemed to accent the whole project well. Then when I cut the photo out with one of the dies from the Floral Frames Framelits set (wasn't that a fortuitous coincidence to use for a photo of a flower!), and cut out a mat from the Cherry Cobbler card stock to frame the photo, I was convinced that Cherry Cobbler was the color for this project.
And for such an elegant flower, I wanted an elegant background. I tried out several of my standard Sizzix Embossing Folders, and none was just what I wanted. Then I stumbled on this one over with my Christmas Card projects – the Lacy Brocade Embossing Folder from the Stampin' Up! 2012 Holiday Catalog. And here I am already hoping that this one stays around for us to continue to use for much longer than the Holiday Catalog is in place!
The greeting for this card is from the stamp set, Curly Cute. Even though "cute" is in the stamp set's name, I do think it has a bit of elegance in it, too!
So now you have to go check out the rest of the projects at the SUO Challenge Blog. And even add your project in the challenge, too!
Robin, this is simply gorgeous! I love how you picked up the colors of the Bird of Paradise so perfectly. How relaxing it must be to look out your window at Paradise!