Project 185: A fresh take on fall colors

This week has been a stressful return to work after a week of traveling for business so I needed to escape into the craft room for a bit of a break! I was looking for inspiration and found a great trio of challenges to fit the brief.

I love the Color Throwdown and this week the colors were a great base to choose from:

I looked at I <3 Pro Markers as their challenge blog always has interesting ideas. They were featuring a Three of a Kind challenge and left it pretty open so I thought that sounded like a fun experiment. My three(s) are:

• 3 flowers
• 3 colors (blue, orange, yellow) 
• 3 papers
• 3 pearls and 3 gems 

I started with the little Fiskars stamp (I think it's Fiskars anyway?) which I bought in a sale earlier this year and have never used. I colored the (admittedly small) image with:

• Orange
• True blue
• Yellow

Earlier today I spied the sketch at Freshly Made Sketches and decided that was a good one to join as it's the sort of layout I like to go for - paper rich and lots of ways to interpret it.

Instead of the circles I used the rectangle image and a punched butterfly - hope that's an ok interpretation of the sketch.

I then looked for complimentary papers and was delighted to find the blue chevron and corrugated orange in my scrap folder. Claire does scrap amnesty really well and I just love a clean sheet....which is why I need to get better about using scraps. Sketch challenges are great for using scraps as you think of paper in different ways.

And also great as I discovered Clear it Out Challenge which is is having a "use your orange stash" challenge - a clear out and a challenge entry - score!

Instead of the banner shape I cut along the chevron lines - just felt like a better way to use the paper.

Finally I topped it all with some bling and pearls and added the little "friends" greeting tucked in the corner under the paper.

And I thought I'd also include this in The Pink Elephant's Anything Goes challenge.
 
It's been a fun evening putting this together - the perfect anecdote to a stressful return to work. And I think