BBTB2 Home Decor Crown Challenge

Good Monday morning! Is everyone recovering from their chocolate hangover? Yeah, me too. This week the fabulously talented and dear friend, Julie, has chosen either crown from Home Decor for our BBTB2 challenge. I started out trying to make a shaped front card, but the cuts I wanted to use weren't cooperating. It would have had to have been long and skinny, and the fold for the base would have been at an inconvenient place so I scrapped that idea, expanded the cuts, and made a wall or door hanger. The base from Picturesque, which I skewed in Design Studio measures 11 1/2 x 8 1/4 so it's fairly large. I apologize for the dark colors, not very Spring-like, eh? but this is for ME (just in case anyone forgets who's BOSS around here) and I'm not a pink kinda gal. The DP is from GCD Studio's Paris Nights collection.

Once I'd chosen and cut the base, the crown posed sort of a problem. I'd hidden the contours of the crown shadow but wanted to fill in that space on the regular cut. I couldn't find another print with the right scale so I cut the blackout in cream card stock and embossed it with the Cuttlebug Textile Texture folder and inked it lightly with Black Soot Distress Ink. It still didn't look right to me. I finally covered the embossing with a single layer of black tulle which muted it ever so slightly and mimicked the print on the DP and I was good to go. Added a little feather there to balance the red "Queen" and of course, adhesive gems.

"Queen of Everything" comes from Graphically Speaking (LOVE that cart!) It's a little hard to read in the first pic, but it's okay IRL. Of course I cut it several times and popped it for dimension, but the one thing I DON'T like about Graphically Speaking is the lack of layers in some cases and no shadow cuts...Grrrr. To get "QUEEN" in red, I postioned the sentiment partially off the page so as not to waste so much paper and then hand trimmed at the base of the letters and popped them slightly offset. Problem solved! Looking at it now, though, I should have cut the whole thing and used the rest under the black"of Everything" to help bring out that part of the sentiment. Oh well, hindsite is always 20/20. The pretty tassel is from J's, I think, and the button it's hanging from is Recollections for M's. It was silver so I colored it with my gold leafing pen. Be sure to bop by BBTB2 and see the gorgeous inspiration from the rest of my teamies and remember that if your don't have Home Decor, any crown will do. Also, if you're so inclined, please check out my Dimensional Challenge on Yvonne's Blog, Do More With Less. I'd sure love to see you play along with BOTH challenges.