Hello dear friends!

I’ve toyed with entering the My Favorite Things Card Design Superstar contest over the past couple of years, but either ran out of time, or felt my card design wasn’t good enough. Mainly the latter, to be honest. But this year, I decided to give it a go! As per the challenge rules, I just used MFT products. It should come as no surprise that I chose to enter the Clean & Simple category as that is my favourite style!

I knew I wanted to use one of my newer dies sets (Houseplants), but I also wanted to use a few different colour combos! For the first plant, I stuck with traditional snake plant colours… then I got more adventurous!

I love the spotty Begonia Maculata so I used that as my inspiration for the largest plant. For the next plant, I started off thinking of a Purple Shamrock, but decided that I wanted a plant with more red tones – like a coleus.

Finally I wanted to use my favourite plant die from this set to create an image inspired by the stunning Christmas Cactus. This required a little more work… and a very old die set! I cut the stems twice and coloured them. I then cut up one of the images and adhered the stems to sit behind the other (intact) die cut, creating 12 stems to play with! I added the six leaves from the die set and then pulled out the Wildflowers Centerpieces Dienamics set. It’s not in the MFT shop anymore, but Veronica used it in this challenge in 2015. Anyway, I coloured a few flowers and adhered them to the remaining stems.

I then created an ink-blended circle with the Circle Extraordinaire stencil on my card base and adhered my plants, placing a few of them on a couple of images cut from the Cat and Plant Perches Dienamics set.

To complete my card, I used a sentiment from a set that I managed to get hold of just last week (Itty Bitty Basics), positioned on a strip cut with the Skinny Strips Dienamics.

And so that, my friends, is the story of my entry, finished an hour before the deadline… yep, I’m up very late in the UK tonight!! My craft table is a complete mess – I think I used every ink blending tool I own (and I have a few)… but the tidying up will have to wait until tomorrow (or rather later this morning)!

Thanks for stopping by!

LucieG.

PS I wasn’t too sure if I needed to share the contest graphics, but here they are just in case!