Summer School Lessons with MFT and Lil' Inker

As I mentioned in my last post, the teachers will be returning to work this Thursday,  [If you don't know me, I'm a school secretary.] and we have a whopping three new teachers this year!  Considering we only have 12 teachers on our staff to begin with, that's HUGE!  As in 25%-of-our-teaching-staff-is-new, huge!  With that many new folks around, I'll really have my work cut out for me.  As the secretary, I'm the first person anyone goes to with questions about anything.

So anyway, I want to welcome our new staff members to the building.  I created this card for our new band/chorus/music director.  Birds make me think "songbird" and nothing says songbird like a music teacher, right?

I recently bought the new Fossilized Amber and Abandoned Coral Distress Inks, so I was playing with them one evening and created the background paper using the "smooshing" technique.  After it was dry, I trimmed it down and splattered it with some Mister Huey's Opaque White spritz.  The sentiment is from PTI's new Watercooler Talk stamp set.  Perfect, right?  :)

The frame was die-cut from PTI Berry Sorbet card stock using Lil' Inker stitched rectangle dies and popped up with foam tape.  The leaves are cut from PTI vellum with a die from the Songbirds set and the little birds I used are a die from Memory Box.  The leaves are glued down to the frame wherever they overlap it and there's some foam tape behind the birds to help support the branches.  Those gorgeous yellow sequins are from Pretty Pink Posh.

I die-cut another stitched panel for the inside [to hide a stamping mistake, but shhhhh!  No one can ever know that I stamped the exact same sentiment on the inside that was already on the outside!  ;)  Our secret.] and stamped a couple of sentiments from My Favorite Things and some musical notes from a Lawn Fawn set and a PTI Boy Basics mini stamp set.

Three new employees.  One card down, two to go!  :)

I'm submitting this card to the following challenges:

This card falls under three different categories on three different posts.  Each one is linked.
1)  Color Saturation - The colors I chose are sort of in the middle, but I think they lean more toward saturated rather than muted.
2)  Hard vs. Soft - My card features softness in the splashy background paper, vellum leaves and die-cut birds; but it also features hardness in the straight lines and sharp corners of the card panels and gorgeous, contrasting sequins.
3)  Color Temperature - I used a warm color palette consisting of coral and yellow with just a touch of neutral - black and white.

Lil' Inker's Monthly Meetup Challenge for August is "anything goes"!  They are celebrating their 5th anniversary this month.  Congratulations on 5 years of crafty success and awesome products!  I'm certainly a big fan!  :)