Brighten my Day....

My crafty friend Carol invited me to join a card making party in August, and I'm so excited I've been playing with ideas all week!  It's an Operation Write Home get together, and I want to bring along a kit to share...  It takes me a l-o-n-g time to come up with a card design, so I went to the clean and simple blog to look through their sketches for a spark of inspiration.

When I saw sketch #105, I knew it was the one I wanted to work with...  here's the sketch:

I came up with a couple of designs that closely followed the sketch, but noticed that I had gravitated to monochromatic in shades of brown.  As much as I like the cards, I thought that some bright colors may be appreciated more by the troops who will be using them.

With that in mind I thought something bright and sunny would work, and modified the sketch into this:

Once the sunshine idea was in my head, the card fell together quickly.  I pulled out a bunch of My Mind's Eye: Fine and Dandy - Boy scraps for rays of sunlight.  The Lili of the Valley Set 9 Mixed Circular Sentiments worked perfectly and was stamped with Vintage Photo Distress Ink.  I popped the sentiment up on foam tape to avoid a lumpy look where the ends of the design paper overlap. 

Pre-made card bases and envelopes have allowed me to put cards together a little quicker, and since the majority of this card is plain cardstock and random triangular scraps, I should be able to pull together the supplies for card kits pretty quickly.  The hardest part for me will be stamping the sentiments... 

Thanks for stopping by - hope your day is filled with happiness and sunshine!
~Kathy