An Apple a Day...

This is one of those cards that started out as a swirling mass of little inspiration sparks in the deep recesses of my brain combining all kinds of lovely details that I had collected over the past week in my travels through blogland. It began its slow journey with this sketch from the excellent 2sketches4you blog which posts a challenge every Monday. I loved the sketch and I really loved the samples the design team had come up with. In particular, a few of the ladies had used that Nesties lable shape I love so much, and one of them had added a gorgeous detail using eyelets and ribbon that I decided I had to try!

Then, as I was surfing around, I came across a simply fabulous tutorial at Paperfections on colouring fruit with Copic Markers. I was in love! But....I didn't own any images of fruit to try it on. So, hot on my (perceived) success at creating a hand drawn image of my dog, I spent a day coming up with some of my own drawn images of fruit. In particular, I was pleased with this image of a bushel of apples. And you know what they say about apples!

So I happily coloured my image using all the wonderful tips and tricks I had learned. And it looked pretty good, I thought. Then I thought of my friend Karen Motz over at Paper Playground and how she sometimes used Crystal Effects to glaze parts of her images and how much I like that. And I realized that I could make the apples....shiny! Even better! (I also borrowed the idea of a little bow made of two strands of twine from Karen's sample for this week's Chicks Challenge).

Finally, I traipsed down the street to my faithful blogging buddy Donna's house to steal some of her fabulous SU punches because my sentiments always look so boring and I love the layered look she always gets using these. Thanks, Donna!

And that, my friends, is the long tortuous road of begging, borrowing, and stealing that this card sent me on. It was a lot of fun!