About 40 Minutes on the Farm

Ever since I finished my craft space reorganization, I've felt a bit aimless with my stamping. Actually, I have been a bit aimless for months now, feeling the itch to shake things up a bit, though whether the shake-up will appear on the blog or not remains to be seen. I have too many ideas and need to settle on one or two and get hopping.

But I procrastinate.

Bet you don't know what that feels like, eh?

Anyway, Wedesday I pulled out On the Farm from Papertrey and decided to play around with it. Here are the cards I made, in the order I made them, in the roughly 40 minutes my children allowed me to work.

I hope my commentary shows not only how cards that are near-misses can be helpful for learning, but also how loosening up and playing with something can be fun! Or funny. Depending on your sense of humor.

I really love the layout and colors above, but I don't love how the green ink shows so strongly through the rusty color I used for the rooster. A little show-through is fine, but this is egregious. He'd be a pain to cut out and pop, so the solution in the future is simply to use a darker color for him. The bling creates a visual triangle...before I added them, the card looked mighty boring and incomplete.

When in doubt, add bling. You can go a bling too far, but it's better to have blinged and failed than never to have blinged at all.

As you might suspect, I just love all the white space on this one. Red and brown make a fun color combo and pop nicely off the white. The chickens are "looking" at the sentiment, which creates the feeling of movement even with so few elements. The rooster wouldn't work on this layout...he's looking the wrong way.

Just like a man.

I'm not a fan of puns in general, though I recognize their popularity in stamping and give in occasionally to the fun. But "herd it's your birthday"? Seriously? Bovine ridiculousness.  I love the weathered frame, though, and hope I can remember it's there for use with other sets. I also like the placement of the label stamp on here.

Did you know a major contributor of the greenhouse gas methane is cows? They fart a lot.

Just sayin'.

 

Finally, here's a card that works in some ways and not in others. The colors are fun, and the use of the border stamp works nicely, but the three images do not. The chicken and rooster are looking at each other (nice design...planned, I'm sure, by Nichole when she designed the set), but the label is floating in the air, which wasn't a good design choice on my part. Oh, to be able to have an ink eraser! Then, when I stamped the sentiment, it just got lost...not dark enough. So I added the brown half-pearls to draw attention to it, but they are just too heavy and look out of place on the card.

Perhaps I should remake this one, change the sentiment to Happy Anniversary, and ditch the label. Or maybe add a few hearts floating above the happy cluckle.

Couple. Cluckle. Chuckle. *snort*

I'm sorry. Not sure what's gotten into me.

Supplies
stamps: On the Farm, Birthday Basics (Papertrey)
ink" Memento
paper: PTI
accessories: half pearls, rhinestones