You’ll hear papercrafters tell you that they get their inspiration from different places.  Some are inspired by their children’s artwork, others by their garden, a view from their window, a piece of clothing or maybe like lots of us – new products.  Today I was inspired by a plate – I’m going to take a stab and say it’s Spode, but maybe someone here would guess differently… anyway, this is a shot of a plate in a magazine and under it is my card.  Mind you, I wasn’t going for exact… just ‘inspired’.  Talk about frustrating though, I find it so annoying to try and photograph a card so that the colouring is correct… this is as close as I could get – my card is more a Wedgewood Blue than you can see in the photo but anyway… and I did purposely go for Vanilla cardstock rather than white as I thought it looked nicer – not as stark.

I enjoy making monochromatic cards, the look is simple and pleasing to the eye.  The colours I’ve used are Ballet Blue and Very Vanilla.  The fern stamp and the bird stamp are from the ‘Touch of Nature’ stamp set by Stampin’ Up! and the border is a little flower stamp from ‘Always’ which is in the new 2008 Spring Mini catalogue.  I actually mucked around with this card for quite a while adding ribbon, taking off ribbon, adding brads, taking off brads.  In the end I decided on two flat-backed ivory pearls (from the Pretties Kit) as everything else was looking too busy for this design.

Anyway, hope you like.  Feel free to comment on what inspires you or to correct me on my guess of plate manufacturer