How do you make simple look beautiful?

I love my upline. She's a great friend and a great mentor. She posted a challenge on her blog on Sunday to create a card using no layers. No layers means you can't use any other card stock than the piece you use for the base of your card. To most of us, this is simply unheard of. Here's her original challenge: Kimberly's Challenge I didn't do anything till Monday because i really had to think about this concept.

How do you make something pretty with just stamps and a piece of card stock? I gave myself an extra day to really think about it and here is what I came up with.

Now I really had to think about this one for awhile and the entire design of this card came together in my head. Originally i didn't know what kind of greeting I wanted to use but since my dad and stepmom's anniversary is coming up here pretty soon i thought i would make this card to give to them.

I think for someone just starting out in stamping, this is the perfect inspiration for them. There's so much you can do with very little. Maybe it helps that the stamp set I used is very versatile and you can come up with some really nice backgrounds using it. The circle stamps on the top all come from the Circle Circus stamp set. I versamark and white embossing powder on the larger circles. The medium circle was stamped in basic black craft (pigment) ink and for the smaller circle i used versamark for the tone on tone gray color. Basic gray was used for the base of the card and I tied it off using a ribbon slide from the silver hodge podge hardware and basic black satin ribbon. The greeting comes from the Teeny Tiny Wishes set.

Here's another one I came up with today.

The challenge didn't end there. I wanted to do something else. I don't know if I like this one as much as my first one but it's not bad.

I used Naturals Ivory card stock as the base of the card. I stamped the first flowers in Old Olive craft ink and embossed it with clear embossing powder. I then masked off each of the flowers and stamped over them with the roses in Melon Mambo ink. I went back over the roses with Passion Pink watercolor wonder crayon and pulled color from the edges into the center of each petal to add color to them. Once I was done with that I shimmer misted over the top half of the card and kept all the masks on until it was dry. I went back over the green flowers and filled them in with Old Olive watercolor wonder crayons as well and lightly filled in the color. i finished it off a bow and stamped happy birthday, also from Teeny Tiny wishes, in Melon Mambo.

I think this is a great challenge for anyone to do and I challenge everyone to try it out and see what they can do.