CASE Study 3rd Anniversary Blog Hop

I'm so excited and honored to be participating in the 3rd Anniversary festivities for CASE Study!  Chupa has put together 3 days of fun filled with lots of inspiration and prizes (yeah, I said prizes!).  Today is the second blog hop, and the only direction Chupa gave us was to find inspiration, any inspiration!  Don't you just love that challenge?

I've decided to CASE a past muse and all around fabuloso designer, Laura Bassen.  Specifically, I chose this masterpiece of hers as inspiration.  Seriously, how awesome is this card?

I'm a big, big fan of Laura's work and this is classic Laura:)  She has a way of taking basic ingredients and transforming them into something spectacular.  Inspired by this awesome card, here's what I came up with!  

As you can see, I started off with the same Simon Says Stamp Grid Border.  The trick to this card was planning and patience.  In order to create each letter I needed 5 rows, but the grid border die is only 4 rows.  I used a little trick to creating a custom and seamless continuous pattern.  To make sure I was perfectly lined up, I used the existing holes and aligned them with the grid.  In the picture below, I have 3 rows of the grid matched up to 3 existing rows.  So only one row is cut along the top.  (Hint: Tape everything together really well before putting it through your die cutter)  The additional row is perfectly aligned and looks like it was a part of the original die!  

To finish the card, I carefully spelled out my sentiment in red and replaced all the extra white squares.  Not difficult, just time consuming!  And like Laura, I used one of those great Quickstik things.  I love those things especially for sequins!

That's it for me!  Thank you so, so much for stopping in today!  And big hugs to Chupa for letting me play along today!  The next stop in the hop is the wonderful Cindy Lee!  If you get lost along the way, head on over to the CASE Study Blog because you don't want to miss a thing!

Mahalo and Aloha,

jj