Challenging Focal

Sometimes you have a focal that you like, but just have a hard time making it work for a card.  This one is a case in point.  I also had one of those times where in trying to fix things, I made them worse. So this card also shows what I did to mitigate that disaster as much as I could.

I had made the focal in a similar way to the one I showed last Friday (cut with Silhouette, emboss, ink, sparkle).  However, I didn't have any more nice fall prints - nor any nice fall stamps to make prints with!  I finally found this scrap of paper and thought it would go nicely with my focal.

I quickly saw that I needed more contrast to help make the focal "pop" and to help my stamped words be seen. So I matted the leaf a couple of times and wrote the letters with a couple of pens (one red, one orange) just offset from the stamping. I quickly decided to run the orange sparkle gel pen around the red mat to help tone down the red and decrease the "Christmas feel" since I wanted this for Thanksgiving!  This is what I had at that point:

It wasn't too bad, but seemed rather blah.  What could I do to spark it up a bit?  I decided maybe we needed another spot of color, so picked a flourish and colored it with the red pen.  BAD PLAN!  It would have been SO much better if I'd had some scraps to try the idea on first!  This is what it looked like:

That colored part stood out like a sore thumb!  What could I do?  I finally realized that adding ribbon borders would help - and that the card would have been great if I'd just done that rather than adding the red on the flourish!  So, I added the ribbon and subdued the flourish as best I could.  Here's what I did:

• Added orange and brown with pens and markers and blended it all with my Dove blender.  This helped, but it was still pretty visible.
• Took a light brown stamp pad to it, taping & rubbing it gently over the mess.  This helped, but gave me some light streaks.
• Took a paper towel, wadded it up, and rubbed it over the area.  This evened out the ink from the stamp pad and I decided it would work.  It's not as nice as if I'd never tried coloring the flourish, but not too bad.