Love you always! A bearded iris, some gold and some challenges.

What do I like about the CAS challenge?  Their name says it all: C(lean) a(nd) S(imple).  It's fun to create something along those lines and have it be elegant and over the top despite keeping it clean and simple.  This week's challenge has the code word "Gold".  Besides silver, gold is my favourite metal for crafting.  The hard part would be zeroing in on just one creation that included gold.

That's where the sketch challenge from Seize the Sketch came in handy.  Using that sketch, I knew how I would design the card.

I love irises, especially bearded irises.  They're such an elegant flower.  On a whim, I bought a stamp called Bearded Iris, part of the Britain in Bloom Collection.  This would be its first inking and I found the prospect exciting.  I had checked out colours of irises on the internet and my choice was to make mine shades  of blue.  A perfect opportunity to use the Night of Navy Blendabilities as well as the Old Olive.

I stamped the image on my Shimmery White cardstock using Memento black ink.  Once I had coloured everything I knew I wanted to fussy cut the image.  I am a bit crazy that way sometimes.  There was a lot of fussy-cutting.  But you do what the creative imp riding your shoulder tells you to do.

The rest of the colours for the card grew out of  the colours in the image of the irises.  So my base cardstock was Marina Mist, then a layer of Crushed Curry, then a layer of Marina Mist and, finally, Gold Foil.

The worst part of the assembly was cutting my dimensionals skinny enough to fit under the narrow cut pieces of the iris and leaves.  But I persevered and, finally, realizing that some of the dimensionals would peek out, coloured the sides of the dimensionals in the appropriate green.  *sigh* What a person will do for art!

I chose a small, square sentiment from the Something to Say stamp set, "love you always!"  I heat embossed that using Gold Embossing powder onto a piece of Night of Navy and then used my 1" square punch to cut it out.  Then I adhered that piece to a piece of Crushed Curry and fussy cut around the square, leaving an extremely narrow piece showing.  Finally I cut a piece of Marina Mist using my Postage Stamp punch and attached the sentiment square to that.

I love it when the finished card is as good as your imagined card, don't you?

For more cards using lots of gold, check out Addicted to CAS.

For more cards using this sketch, check out Seize the Sketch.

For cards with "anything goes", check out (PIN)spirational Challenges.