Papertrey's September Blog Hop Challenge - Inspiration!

The theme for this month's PTI Blog Hop is to create a card using one of your favorite learned skills from someone in blogland. Honestly I have learned so MUCH from friends I have made along the way but I want to spotlight the technique that changed my card making around. That would be the tissue paper flower tutorial from Mona Pendleton which you can view here. Until I watched that video, I was pretty much a go by the "rule book" card maker and never stepped outside of the box. This video changed my world and now you will hardly see a card made by me that doesn't have some type of flower on it!

This is a close up of a tissue paper flower I cut out using my Nestabilities blossom die along with a metal "Thanks" tag. I used pink and aqua because I know Mona loves those colors. I even opened the bag of my Martha Stewart labels and used one for the first time as a background! Yes, I was saving them for something special and this was it! If you look closely, you will see that I used my PTI Damask Impression plate on the aqua.

Here's the finished card. I embossed the PTI Raspberry Fizz paper with my Cuttlebug Damask embossing folder for texture and framed it with a wide velvet ribbon on the bottom and a piece of cording on the top. The text paper is from PTI's Raspberry Fizz Mix. The leaves were die cut with a Sizzix leaf die and that FABULOUS felt is PTI's Chartreuse felt. I LOVE this felt so much because of the quality! I also took a SU marker and drew a vein in each leaf to make it look more dimensional.

So thank you Mona for so many things - for help on purchasing a light tent so I can take wonderful pics of my cards; for answering all of my email questions about blogging when I was first starting out; for teaching me how to link my cards and what that green bug looking thing was!!; for explaining what it meant to follow someone - LOL!; and for always being so supportive with your comments.

Honestly the BEST thing about this hobby is the wonderful people you meet along the way! HUGS to all my blog friends!!!