The Anatomy of Design

Have you ever seen a card design, on the web or Pinterest and liked it so much you decided to CASE it?  But somehow somewhere between the picture and your execution of the design something got lost in translation? 

That totally describes my most recent card crafting efforts.  I saw this design last summer from Stampin’ Dreams and just now got around to crafting it.  I liked the colors, the birthday cake design and the background which is the Stampin’ Up stamp set, Gorgeous Grunge which has become a current obsession of my mine that I actually own.  I did not have the cake stamp set, Build a Birthday however, but I thought how hard could that be to recreate with paper piecing?  I love paper piecing, as an engineer and a draftsman at heart, before the age of CAD; I see it as the ultimate challenge. 

I figured I would make the cake stand by edge punching the fluted edges and hand sketching/cutting the base.   As far as the cake layers go, they could be simply created by strips of patterned paper.  With that design set in my mind I began looking for the right patterned paper to fit my scheme.  As I said before I loved the color scheme Lori Mueller used and as it happened I do have both the ‘So Saffron’ and ‘Lost Lagoon’ stamp pads BUT what I didn’t have was any patterned paper that would work with those colors. 

Weird, because while I don’t buy a lot of paper from Stampin’ Up rather preferring to “impulse” buy it when I see it on sale.  It has started to become a problem as I have almost 2 feet high? of paper pads?!?!  Yikes!!  What I did find was a combination of muted blue, lime green & gray.  So using the patterns from a DCWV Limoncello Stack and the stamp pads - Night of Navy & Wild Wasabi, here is my first attempt at this card.

Not a very good one, I have to admit.  The cake stand and cake are way too big, and the paint splatter got away from me.  The card had way too much going on and not enough of a contrast between anything.  So I went back to the drawing board, because I really like this card.  First stop was the Stampin’ Up catalog where I took a second look at the Build a Birthday stamp set.  This helped me resize my cake stand and cake so they were more proportioned to my card size.  Then I took a second try at creating the paint splatter and the “grunge”.  After inking the stamp I did the first stamp on scrap paper and then stamped on the card face hoping to keep the splatter images more subdued.  Also I sanded the cake stand to give it more texture.  Lastly I added hand cut candle “flames” out of a yellow gold card stock to give the card some contrast.  What do you think of it now???