Our Craft Lounge - Distressed and Stressed Challenge #90

Good Friday Morning!!  I'm so excited to be here with you today bringing you my first "official" creation as a Guest Designer for OCL! 

Today our challenge was to Stress and Distress!!  This is challenge #90 and we'd LOVE for you to come play along right here! 

I've used the beautiful and serene Shades of Fall set.  It's a clear acrylic stamp set with seven gorgeous images and six lovely and very versatile sentiments all for $14.99.  It's a FABULOUS and must have in your seasonal collections!

I've used a mish mash of papers from my scrap drawers to create a flurry of Autumn on my 5.5" x 5.5" card.  I layered my matte papers, sponged the edges with distress ink and then stitched them together using a zig zag stitch.  I then curled the edges up using a toothpick.  I used more distress ink and my ink blending tool to get the curled edges inky as well. 

I used my Cricut to cut a giant oval and layered tags out for my central focus point.  I used a Swiss dot embossing folder for the large oval and then sponged the edges of that layer.  I did the same with my central focus tag elements after I stamped "gratitude" "blessings" and "peace" on in black Colorbox ink and heat set with black embossing powder.  I added some dark grey, satin ribbon to the tags to finish that layer off.

I then set to work on my leaves.

I stamped the various leaves that come with the set on kraft and vanilla cardstock.  I then took a bunch of my distress inks in a variety of fall colors and patted them onto my Kraft sheet.  I sprayed them with pearlized water and water colored each one.  When they were dry I carefully trimmed them all out and layered them as surrounding focal points to the top left and bottom right of my main layer.  I added a few different color die cut flourishes on the lower right in addition to a few sparkly, self adhesive rhinestones and a bit of rustic twine. 

I had such a blast creating with this gorgeous set!!  I hope you come join us over a at OCL for this awesome challenge and come and check out what's new in the fabulous OCL store!!