My First Easel Card

I'd seen these clever Easel cards while on my travels through blog land but never had a go myself - until today that is when I fancied trying something different for a couple of challenges I had my eye on. So armed with a tutorial from Split Coast Stampers I set to work.  I love these little mice from Penny Black and wanted to keep them the focus of the card so have kept the embellishments simple and to a minimum. The mice are very cute and so I think this qualifies my card for the Craftalicious challenge, which funnily enough is 'cute', and over at A spoonful of Sugar the theme is Animal crackers, so am trying my luck here too. Because I've distressed the edges and used my distress inks to make my own background I'm also entering into the 'Distressing' One Stop Craft Challenge (that doesn't sounds quite right but you know what I mean!)

I painted the mice on water colour paper with watercolour paints and used milled lavender, dusky Concorde and spun sugar distress inks to create the border and background papers. For the background paper I stamped with Hero Arts Sparkle Clear – Cupcakes, embossed in clear and then distressed over the top with the  inks.  I also spritzed with Moonglow Dessert Moon wild iris glitz spritz (blimey that's a mouthful!)but you can't really see that on the photo. I distressed the edge of this piece and mounted on dark purple hand made paper (not hand made by me I might add).  A little bow and some crystals finished off the top piece.  The bottom piece is just some lilac card matted on more hand made paper, stamped with a cherry from Maya Road  -  Cupcake singleton and a flower from the Hero Arts set, I then used some cut out stamped images of the Hero Arts cupcakes to hold the easel in place and added the 'Eat your Cupcake' Sentiment from the same set. 

Over all I'm pleased with the result - I don't like filling my cards with oodles of flowers and frills and one of the things I've realised from browsing blogs and seeing all the gorgeous creations is that my style definitely leans towards 'Less is More' and I'm not a crafter who feels the need to fill every available space. Maybe that's because I'm not brave enough to try and just play it safe!   Thank goodness we're all different though, I'm so enjoying seeing all your work and learning as I go.  Thanks for sharing...and looking..and thanks to those who leave their comments, I read them and appreciate them all!  Esther xx