my artistic release

Good Morning All!
Here it is Thursday and I haven't posted anything since last Friday, can we say "slack"?
FCD posts a new challenge each Sunday for the Design Team, we can participate if we want but it is not mandatory; this weeks challenge was basically just a background. The background is so "not me" that I figured it would be a good personal challenge to try to do something like it. So I decided to play along and made a card with the challenge background as my inspiration. First here is the challenge piece:

(sorry for the size)

Using my October stamp set Tumbling Scarecrow I decided to use one of the verses included which talks about the smells and sights of fall. Using fall colors as my palette this is the card I came up with.

As you can see this is way outside my usual style, but you know, I kind of like the way it turned out! :)  I used a piece of printed card stock from Club Scrap as the background mat, then I covered that with a piece of burlap looking, straw feeling material. I used various ink colors to swipe color directly on the material, this gave me license to put as many fall colors as I wanted into the paper pieces attached on top. These pieces came from various papers I had on hand, I did ink the edges to sort of bring them all into the color palette. Then I took a piece of the original mat paper and used a Fiscars border punch and attached it just under the edge of the straw material. Taking the verse from FCD stamp set I inked with versamark, black ink and clear embossed,  then cut out each part of the verse so I could fit it on the small piece of mat paper. The frame is from Spellbinders which when cut out gives you the small mat piece used for the verse. Clear as mud??

Ok, the frame was used as a stencil as well as a die cut so I could color in the open areas and then smooshed it into versamark and Utee'd. I did this twice to get the gloss I was looking for. The little apple embellies are from the Tumbling Scarecrow set as well and of course I had to Utee them to make sure they showed up. There you go, a card which uses the Challenge, makes me think outside my normal style and an acceptable card at that!  Challenges can be such a "good thing"!!

Thanks for stopping by, leave me your thoughts and comments. Hope your day is as bright as the colors of fall!!