Ink & Inspiration Blog Hop – February challenge

February 28, 2025

Welcome to February’s Ink & Inspiration Blog Hop. You may be starting at my blog or landed here after Tracy’s.

Each month there is a new Ink & Inspiration challenge. This month we have an inspirational image and colour challenge. We can use either part to create our project. Here are our instructions.

INK – Use the colour challenge to create a project unrelated to the image – {we can use some or all colours plus the Stampin’ Up! Basics Colours (Basic Beige, Basic White, Very Vanilla, Basic Black)}
INSPIRATION – Use the image subject as inspiration for your project.

Any way you can tie them together is fine or if you are feeling super creative, use BOTH!

Here is the prompt we were given:

I LOVE the bright colours! My first thought was I was going to use those colours with flowers, but then when I was looking through my Designer Series Paper (DSP), I realised I had the PERFECT paper for this, in the Friends of the Ocean pack. This changed the direction of my thoughts and I’ve ended up with a totally different card than I’d planned, but I love how it turned out.

First I fussy cut a section of the DSP to cover the bottom right, to represent the coral in the photo. A piece of Azure Afternoon card stock was embossed using the Soft Waves 3D embossing folder. I adhered this to my Calypso Coral card base, then added my fussy cut DSP. Then I added a couple of die cut large coral pieces (from the Beauty of the Deep die set) in Melon Mambo and Calypso Coral. Next, I added five smaller coral pieces cut from Summer Splash. I stamped three angel fish (from the Beauty of the Deep stamp set) with Memento black ink and coloured them with my Blends, plus stamped two smaller fish, then die cut these and placed them on the card, hiding in the coral.

The sentiment is from one of my favourite stamp sets, Layering Leaves. I’ve stamped it using Summer Splash ink then fussy cut around it to minimise the amount of white. I finished with three Rhinestones and added some Wink of Stella on all the fish (sadly it doesn’t show in my photos) for extra shine.