Allsorts Challenge and tribute to Kath

I've already written a good bit on here about 'our Kath' from 'My Plain and Simple', who we all lost a few weeks ago. On Sunday I made a card for the current Challenge for Kath over at Allsorts - where Kath was a DT stalwart. The theme was chosen by Kath months ago as part of her usual DT role and she chose 'Favourite Stamp(s)' - and the DT have added the option of 'floral and paper piecing'. Two things which appeared on Kath's gorgeous cards very regularly.

And this is my card:

I used: 

- DL white card blank

- the front (or back?) half of a DL card, trimmed to an eighth of an inch smaller all round than the card front and then set aside

- one of my most loved, and oldest, stamps is Penny Black's 2007 'love blush' - so I used that and Memento 'Tuxedo Black' ink to stamp the image onto a piece of white card and also onto a couple of sheets (red and pale green respectively) from the Prima 'Firefly' paper pack

- fussy cut the leaves and roses from the stamped papers - as always I ran a non-bleeding brush pen round the edge of each of the fussy cut pieces

- a few of the pieces were so tiny to fussy cut that I used Polychromos pencils to colour the relevant small pieces on the image panel itself

- then glued the roses and leaves onto the image panel - using a glue pen and added a few red and green Polychromos strokes here and there

- had a dig around my folder of 'stitched edge' dies and found a good fit using a Presscut Oval 'Stitch Hole' die - so then die cut the image into an oval panel

- cut four strips a quarter of an inch wide from some of the leftover patterned paper and glued them to the top and bottom of the main front panel before trimming all sides from the back using small scissors

- chose a sentiment to use from the Penny Black 'Special Thoughts' stamp set

- used a removable tape runner to temporarily fix the image panel in place so the sentiment would be nicely spaced

- then used the Misti and Memento 'Tuxedo Black' ink to stamp the sentiment

- peeled the oval image panel off and then popped it back in the same place using thin Ultratape sticky pads - I love these as they give dimension without being too thick and can easily be snipped into small piece for adhering small images etc. to cards

- glued the whole front panel to the card front - finished!

As SaRn said, Kath would have had something to say about the 'tongue out' look of concentration that we all seem to assume when doing paper piecing!

You still have a few days left to join in with the Challenge for Kath, link at the top of this post. It runs until 12 noon (GMT) on Friday. Quite apart from being a tribute to a very talented lady, there are also some lovely prizes to be won. 

Edit: Many thanks to Barbara for the heads up to The Sisterhood of Snarky Stampers where the current challenge theme is 'Paper Piecing'. My first time playing along and apparently a snarky sentiment isn't necessary. In fact, I always thought it was a 'closed shop' and not open to all. How wrong can you be. I did smile at Barbara's comment along the lines of 'Who would think to paper piece flowers and leaves' - given the tiny size of them, my reply would be 'Only an idiot like me'.