In Neutral at "Less is More"

I'm staggered at how quickly the weeks seem to roll by. It's  March already and time for another colour challenge at "Less is More". This time around we chose NEUTRALS which range from off white to black with all the shades of beige, brown and grey in between.

We are sponsored this month by WOW Embossing Powders and the the lucky winner will receive a caddy containing 12 different powders. What a fab prize!

A few weeks ago I was inspired by one of our LIMettes Birgit, to buy this set of stamps Available at Blockheads which is from an A4 sheet of floral images. It has tulips, poppies and I think calendulas and is simply stunning.

This time I decided to use a darker background and to use bleach to colour or rather take colour from the images. To add a little depth, once the image was dry, I did use an Inktense pencil from Derwent, which I blended with a water brush. The frame, made from a piece of packaging was cut with a Nestie rectangle, extending the length of the aperture slightly, to accommodate the size of the image. The whole thing was mounted on a Sahara Sand card base.

Here are another couple of bleached images, this time using black embossing powder on black paper. I tried using black card but the bleach made little difference. I had such fun doing these. This stamp is really rather large and makes leaving any white space somewhat problematic, but by using only plain paper and cardstock, with no patterned paper the simple style is maintained.

Different effects can be achieved by the amount of bleach and the areas of the stamp which are concentrated upon. I really love the colour that this one turned out... a perfect match for the SU Sahara Sand card.
I inked the dry embossed panel with a little Sahara Sand and Black Soot inks to emulate the shading on the flowers.
The tag is from Cuttlebug and the sentiment from Wild Rose Studios.

This simple little number includes some home made washi tape. I stuck a sheet of double sided adhesive paper onto a sheet of tissue paper and then stamped the tissue using various wheels on my Rollagraph  handle. I then sliced it into strips and simply peeled back the backing paper to apply it to the card, tearing the end rather than cutting it. The birds on a wire punch is from Martha Stewart... isn't it cute! The sentiment is from Stampin' Up.






My husband got a new toy on Thursday... also a neutral colour, we took it for a drive to our daughter's yesterday, there are quite a few things to master on it as they have updated lots of features compared to our last car. It looks quite mean doesn't it!
Our daughter and her family have suddenly decided to come for the weekend, so I've a few beds to prepare this morning and the cot to get down from the loft... busy, busy!

Do join in with our challenge again this week, we love to see so many inspiring contributions.