Inspiration Takes an Unusual Direction, Part 3 and a Word about Thick Embellishments

As I've said for the past two days, seeing some peat pot cards in Take Ten made me want to play with textures, but another part of the appeal of the inspiration cards was their use of different, unusual collage-type elements (buttons, twine, snaps, dymo label, etc.) in a very simple way. On my first card, I used the wooden heart and twine, on yesterday's card I tried to use buttons and papyrus with a bird punch.  Here's a much more successful attempt using the StampinUp bird punch.

This design is much more unified than yesterday's, which felt like too much stuff and somewhat disjointed. The musical acrylic piece (a RAK from Audrey...thank you!) relates to the bird in color and theme, the pearls are a tiny bit egg-like, and string belongs on a bird's nest.

The marbled paper is from a scrap left over from previous projects. The swirly soft-pink colors have a hint of gold shimmer (like the gold ink of the music on the acrylic piece) which is absolutely lovely in real life and complements the shimmer and color of the pearls as well. 

For those of you who, like me, rarely use big thick embellishments on cards, it really can be fun to play around with them on occasion. To duplicate the idea without the bulk, however, would be fairly easy if you have either musical patterned paper or a music stamp. Punch a circle of the music and use either a) a thin acrylic sticker over it (i.e., Page Pebbles) or b) Crystal Effects. That way, you could easily mail it in a standard envelope.

Or you can just say the heck with it and use a ridiculously thick embellishment. Whatever works for you.