A Fun Card For a Fun Sketch — Great Stamping with Connie

Do you ever want to make a card but struggle with where to start? Using a sketch to jump start your creativity is a great place. Sometimes looking at a layout with no actual stamped images gets your brain in motion and gives you a great creative idea for a card. Having a fun sketch to work from is a great starting point. The SUO (Stampin’ Up! Only) Challenge has a fantastic fun sketch that got my creative juices flowing and led me to this card.

And here is the great sketch that got it all started.

The annual catalogue for this year will end soon (end of May), so I have been using a number of great items that will retire soon. You can see some of my In Colour celebrations in recent blog posts, but today I am celebrating some of the fantastic Designer Series Paper that will retire. I have loved the Animal Expedition DSP since I first saw it. All those cute animals, some that you can easily cut out with the coordinating Animal Friends dies, and others that make great additions to any card. There are fun patterns on the back too, but I love the animals so much I hardly ever turn the paper over!
For this card I cut a bunch of the animals and layering pieces with different dies from the Layering Squares and Layering Circles Framelits.

There were so many cute pictures I couldn’t decide right away what I wanted to do, so I just cut a whole bunch! I used the smallest square for the card above and set them out on my card as indicated by the sketch. To border them, I decided to use the Leaf Ribbon from the same Animal Expedition suite. It gives everyone a fresh leaf to munch on if they get hungry!!! My sentiment is from the Itty Bitty Birthdays stamp set. It is a wonderful set with lots of birthday celebration sentiments. I layered it on a piece of Shaded Spruce card stock, cut with the Tailored Tag punch and painted with Wink of Stella for a bit of sparkle.
Want to see where the rest of the animals are hanging out? I made two more cards with them.