SketchThis! Miss You

I love how the SketchThis! blog uses the same sketch for both cards and layout design.  It's always so interesting to see how the different creative minds work with the same basic design.

When I work with a sketch, I usually think about each of the individual elements of the design and different creative possibilities.  When I saw the stacked squares along the bottom of this sketch, I thought of the vintage postage stamps I got for Christmas.  I thought they might look fun lined up as a border. 

Thinking about stamps led to thoughts of letters traveling to far away places ... and then to my far away friends.  My card design developed from there.

I picked out several stamps that had bright springy colors to coordinate with the Penny Black Wherever They Grow! Floral sticker as my main design element (it has postage stamps on the background).  I cut the sticker in half and overlapped the blooms on a torn piece of handmade yellow paper.  The Our Time Together sentiment from Stampabilities is stamped in Warm Green ColorBox Chalk and clear embossed. 

Since all of those bright colors seemed a bit busy, I used a scattering of different sized clear adhesive gems to unify the design.  Thanks to Janelle for another great sketch.

Comments

[Cindy Haffner]

Cool sketch so unique. Excellent job.

[jami {sgtStamper}]

What a great sketch - I love what you did with the stamps at the bottom, and your main image is super cool too!!
hugs, Jami

[Anne]

Hi Stef,

I love your card, and all of the different elements you have used. I wanted to tell you a little bit about the stamp on the right hand corner. As you can probably tell, it's a New Zealand stamp, and the flower and leaves shown are from the Kowhai tree. Kowhai is a Maori language word pronounced kor-fi (fi as in the fi of fibre). It's a very pretty tree, and kowhai is the Maori word for yellow, so you can see how the tree came to be named. I was excited to see that stamp as I remember it very well from my childhood. It was released, I discovered, on 1 September 1960, when I had only recently celebrated my 1st birthday lol, and it stayed in circulation, I think, for quite a few years.
The value of the stamp is 3 pence or 3D as it was written. (The abbreviation of a "d" for a pence comes from the Latin denarius, a small silver coin of ancient Rome originally equivalent to 10 bronze asses!)
I have found a link for you if you would like to have a look at other stamps from the same release: http://stamps.nzpost.co.nz/NZPost/SearchResultClick.ashx?/cgi-bin/MsmGo.exe?grab_id=1268&page_id=7931392&query=kowhai&hiword=kowhai+

Thank you for including that stamp on your lovely card - it made my day when I saw it in my email. It was very nostalgic for me, and I spent a very enjoyable 10 minutes or so researching some local history from my liftime.

Have a very happy New Year - I'm looking forward to continuing to read your blog in 2009 and see what masterpieces you come up with.

Hugs, Anne. dinkuminkum at yahoo dot co dot nz

PS - sorry this was such a long post - you can probably tell I used to be a teacher lol.