World Card Making Day inspiration - Day One

Recently, card makers around the globe celebrated World Card Making Day on the first Saturday of October.  The paid membership site I belong to, Stamp Nation, celebrates this holiday every year, but instead of on just one day, they make it a weekend long event!  This year, their Creative Team members posted a favorite place around the world that they have either lived or visited.  Each post had a collage of their photos from their travels.  It also included what the flag looks like from that particular place.  These photos and flags served as inspiration for other members to make cards based off of the original post.  There were eight posts over the course of the weekend and playing along with the challenges was so much fun!  I thought you might enjoy seeing the cards I created for these challenges.

DAY ONE: England
The first post was by the owner/founder of Stamp Nation, Catherine Pooler.  She and her husband visited England earlier in the year.  She posted lots of photos of her travels.  There were pictures of Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, lots of architecture, and flowers.  Having visited England myself, I so enjoyed seeing her pictures of her trip.  The picture that I used as inspiration was of a chalkboard sign that was on the sidewalk in front of a store.  The phrase on the sign said "Do more of what makes you happy."  It had some nice flowers drawn around the phrase and I thought the message itself was inspirational!  Here is the photo I used as inspiration:

Sometimes, when I used "mood boards" for inspiration, it's hard for me to NOT create a literal replication of what I see in the pictures...it was sort of the case here.  Below is my take on this sign.  I found an inspirational sentiment among my stamp sets and knew that I had to recreate the chalkboard look.  I white heat embossed the sentiment onto black card stock.  I have lots of flower die cuts in my stash, so it was just a matter of finding the right sized ones to cut out of some cheery colors.  It may be hard to tell from the inspiration sign, but the name of the store looks like it is a gold color...so I used some baker's twine that had some gold in it to tie at the top of my card.  I felt this was a pretty literal take on the inspiration, but it got me started on my World Card Making Day weekend of fun!

DAY ONE: Hungary
There was a second post on day one and this time, the place of inspiration was the country of Hungary.  I have never been to Hungary, but the photos were still inspiring!  This post was by Kelly Martin, a member of Stamp Nation's creative team.  Most of her photos were of the beautiful, old architecture of that region.  But what I was inspired by, was the Hungarian flag as seen here.  It seems like a pretty simple thing to be inspired by, but that's what caught my eye in her photo collage!

I have used a technique once or twice in the past that I knew I wanted to try out with this flag as my inspiration.  I took a rectangular acrylic block and applied some red ink to one edge and green ink to the opposite edge.  I took my water spritzer and sprayed some water onto the block.  This made the ink sort of pool up on the block.  I then quickly turned the block upside down and pressed it into the middle of a piece of watercolor card stock and held it there for a minute or so while the water and ink absorbed into the paper.  The tricky part was lifting the block straight up so as not to mix the wet ink too much.  I had a paper towel on standby to blot up any extra pools of ink that may have run together.  After that dried, I stamped a globe from the new Catherine Pooler Amber's World stamp set.  I used Versamark ink to stamp it and then applied WOW Embossing Powder in Rose Gold.  After I heat set it, I was done!  I didn't feel like I needed to add any more embellishments to the card except for mounting it onto a card base.  I really like how this one turned out and after posting it on the Stamp Nation site, I received many compliments and some members even used MY card for their inspiration!  Here's a look at my finished card:

I will post day two and three later.  Day two had four challenges: Portugal, Hawaii, Canada, and Italy.  Look for more posts coming soon!  Thanks for stopping by!