Outside the Box

These cards are definitely outside the box for me.  I tend to stay away from dark colors and shadows but that's pretty hard to do if you want to use Tim Holtz paper!

I incorporated some old stamps I had on hand plus one of the new ones I found at Michael's last week.  The twine I used on one just didn't look right so I dug around and found some old raffia that was left over from who knows what project from years ago!

The text strip is from an old reference book and I used a Cuttlbug folder to emboss the circles and some Distress Ink to stain it some.

The top card has the images stamped with brown ink, the bottom one has black ink.  I prefer the black ink images.  I wish I made better photographs because these cards really look like they have more dimension in person.  The lighting back here makes the upper right rectangle look shiny and it's definitely not.


EDITED:  The more I look at these, the more I think the background is too flat.  I'm going to experiment with stamping my corners and then embossing the green background paper and see if I like it any better.