Balloons? Again? Yes. Well Jane, one of my fellow Design Team members at CAS Colours & Sketches, really likes them you know. Balloon Celebration is one of my favourite sets at the moment and I love that it comes in a bundle with the punch. Actually this is the card that I made at the crop when I was contemplating the colour challenge (which just finished) but half thinking about the sketch challenge and made one that would fit both. Oops! It went through a few iterations – there was a slightly fuzzy stamping of the balloon strings which I declared not perfect. My friend Julia, sitting next to me said it was good enough for her and saved it from the scrap heap! I have a cut down version too which I’ll share soon. I just have to warn you, there’s a lot of melon mambo!

Here’s the banner which inspired my card:

Fun isn’t it? The circles are all slightly different sizes. I hope you’ll pop over to the challenge blog to check out the other DT’s inspiration and to have a go yourself. I used to avoid sketch challenges, now I’m really enjoying them. Try it out, you might like it.

I decided to stick with a square card because that seemed to balance the sketch nicely. I had the colours already in my head – melon mambo, pink pirouette and pumpkin pie and stamped the bubbles in the same colour as the card. I punched them out with the balloon bouquet punch and then looked back at the sketch. Three different sized circles. So out came my paper snips and I reduced the size of the pink pirouette balloon a bit. Julia was using soft suede on her card and I decided to be really different and use that for my strings and sentiment rather than using my usual black. I think the softer look really adds something – I’ll have to try that more often. Then it was a simple matter of attaching the balloons – the top one on both bunches is popped up with dimensionals for added fun. I can’t believe how rarely I used dimensionals when I started card making, the added, um, dimension really can make the card more exciting.

The card was square so out came the envelope punch board and the regular whisper white card stock. I love that we can make (almost) any sized envelope. Well, 66 different sized ones of them at least.