Take Time to Smell the Flowers - Sketch & Stash #13

This week's Sketch & Stash Challenge has an optional challenge of using animal themed stash. This made my mind up as to what I was going to stashbust this week :) - a lovely dog stamp that my friend Anne bought me from Little Claire's stand at Ally Pally. I fell for 2 dog stamps and have coloured the larger one several times and not been happy with the effect I've got.

For this card I pulled out the little terrier stamp and inked it up at last. I masked it off and stamped an Elzybell's flower stamp onto the background. I coloured the images in with Koh-i-Noor pencils and blended them, adding some Distress Ink around the edges.

The gorgeous papers are Basic Grey from their Porcelain 6x6 pad, fairly new stash from the Stamp Attic, and the two flowers are new stash. I've bought the most beautiful stamp plate from Elusive Images called Retro Vases, with, I think, 40+ images to it. It's taken me a while to cut them out and now I need to start to use them :). This hardly gives much idea of their potential, but I stamped the little star flowers with pink chalk ink, cut them out with a circle punch and shaped the edges. They looked too white so I rubbed more Distress Ink across them and painted the flower middles with it.
I think the dog looks a bit like Sweep, our terrier, but those who know her may think it looks rather better tempered than Sweep :)