Sketched Birthday in Blue

I haven't spent much time checking out other blogs and stamping venues lately.  Just not enough hours in the day to spend oodles of those precious hours surfing the web to see what everyone is up to in the creative world.  But today I was looking for something in particular that I thought I'd seen somewhere (and it wasn't there!).  I did discover a sketch challenge though.  Oh, how I miss doing those on a regular basis to keep me creative!!  I thought today would be a perfect day to try my hand at the challenge, so here we go.  The sketch is found here at the Clean and Simple Stamping blog.  I had an idea that I thought would work and gave it a try.  Think I like what I came up with...

Stamps:  Sketched Birthday, Sweet Essentials, and Hello to You (Paper Pumpkin set)
Ink:  Indigo pad, Soft Sky, Calypso Coral, Island Indigo markers
Paper:  Soft Sky, Calypso Coral, and Whisper White
Accessories:  Big Shot with Tasteful Trim Bigz XL Die, Paper Piercing Tool and Mat, Essentials Paper Piercing Pack, 1 1/4" Circle Punch, 1 3/4" Scallop Circle Punch, Rhinestone Basic Jewels,  and Dimensionals

It was fun having a starting place of a sketch to work with.  I changed around my color scheme a couple of times, but that's not surprising.  The sketch didn't call for the scalloped layer under the main layer, but it looked too plain for my taste.  Dare I say almost boring?  And we can't have that!   So it was added to go along with the scallop punch.  I had planned to use the cute little Candy Dots for the embellishments, but ended up liking the rhinestones better.

I love the little chevron  background stamp from one of my Paper Pumpkin kits.  It's been used several times to give a fun pop of pattern and color.  These Paper Pumpkin kits are really handy to have around.

Well, that's it for this Sunday's edition of the stamping news.   I've been working on a couple other things today as well.  We'll see if they work out as planned and get posted for your viewing pleasure.  Hope you all have a great week.  And get those stamps inked and ready - it's time to stamp!     Sharon