You're the Bees Knees!

Every month, Operation Write Home has a themed challenge sponsored by Our Daily Bread Designs. This month's theme is to use an insect on your card. I have had these "bee" greetings from Sweet 'n Sassy Stamps for quite some time now, and had gotten the bee rubber stamp that I used in this card with those greetings in mind. I had yet to use them, though, so I decided this challenge would be a perfect time to break them out and make a card!

For the design, I used the following sketch from OWH:

I did make some alterations to the sketch. I left out the 3 circular embellishments in the upper left corner, didn't add twine (actually, I forgot about that until it was too late!), made the focal panel/mat slightly smaller, and matted the card front panel. But I did keep the basic "bones" the same.

For the background panel, I taped Colorbox's "Swirldot" stencil over a piece of white cardstock, and inked through it with Mustard Seed Distress ink and my mini ink blending tool. I felt it was a bit too stark, though; so after I inked it, I lightly spritzed some Lemon Zest Dylusions spray ink over it. Then I set that aside to dry.

I cut my focal panel from white cardstock to 2-7/8"x4-1/8", and printed the greeting directly on that, towards the bottom. I used my Stamp-a-ma-jig to get the bee positioned just right, and stamped that in Ranger Archival Jet Black ink. I had initially intended to color it with my Inktense pencils & water, so stamped it in that waterproof ink. But I ended up coloring it with colored pencils instead. No big deal, though!

I felt the upper right corner was a bit bare, and thought about adding brads. But I was afraid it would unbalance the design a bit too much, so I ended up adding one brad to each corner. To mat the panel, I cut a piece of yellow patterned paper from The Paper Studio to 3"x4-1/4", which left a 1/16" border around the focal panel. I further matted that onto a piece of black paper, also leaving a 1/16" border.

From there, the assembly was fairly easy. I adhered the stenciled panel to another piece of black paper that I'd cut to a standard A2 card size. I left a 1/16" black border around the yellow panel, which I felt "grounded" the yellow better. I glued the focal panel to the card front, and then adhered the front to my card base with my ATG adhesive runner.

I'm entering this card into the following challenges:

Operation Write Home ODBD "Insect" challenge
Simon Says Stamp's Monday "Not so Mellow Yellow"
Simon Says Stamp's Wednesday "Anything Goes"