Beautiful Blue

So, I belong to my local Woman's Club (which my oldest brother, bless his heart, says I'm too young for).  Each club year, we host a reciprocity meeting, which is when we invite members of other clubs to join us.  This year, the chair has asked me to make our invitations, so I made up a sample.  It's based on what she told me her decorations will be.  This may or may not be the exact final product, depending on feedback, but this is what I came up with.

Believe it or not, it took me several hours to come up with the final result.  I kind of knew what I wanted to do, but kept getting creative block.  So I'd stop & work on something else for a while, then search for an SVG, then find the right color of ribbon in my massive stash, you get the picture.  The easiest part was choosing the stamps.  I had it in my head before I even got off the phone.  Total time was really only about 20 minutes, my brain just didn't want to cooperate!  Making the remainder will take no time at all, now that I know what I'm doing...

I started by stamping the cup from the A Sip stamp set in White Daisy pigment ink on some Moonstruck CS.  After heat embossing with white powder, I cut out the cup.  Next, I stamped a group of flowers from the Flower Pot stamp set in White Daisy pigment ink on White Daisy CS.  I then colored in the image using markers in Sunflower, Cotton Candy, and Topiary and cut it out.

After wasting time hunting through my Cricut cartridges, I discovered I didn't have anything with the shape I wanted to cut out without making it myself.  So I opened up my trusty Make The Cut software and searched the gallery.  I found the pretty scalloped circle shape with the cut outs, which was exactly what I wanted.  I sized it on my virtual mat, making sure that the  inner area would be large enough for my image plus a little.  After cutting it from Moonstruck paper, I pulled in a circle from the Basic Shapes and sized it to fit inside the scalloped circle.  I cut that from Baby Blue paper.

I used the Swiss Dots embossing folder from Cuttlebug for the front of my card, using a technique I got from Lisa Stenz, another CTMH consultant.  You just emboss the upper portion, then turn it around and emboss the bottom portion, leaving a width plain for your sentiment.  Using my Scor-Pal, I scored a line at the top & bottom of this strip.  I stamped my sentiment from the discontinued Simple Invites stamp set in Moonstruck.  I adhered my circles to the front of the card, then adhered my cut out stamped images using foam adhesive tape.  I pulled some bright pink ribbon from my stash, and adhered it around the inner front edge of the card to finish it off.