Masculine Stamping

Today's card is another one I made with a masculine flavor.  I'm a bit frustrated with the picture - the colors aren't quite the same as the card. In person, you can see that on the original card, the blue matting is not as strong, and the purple stripes are more muted as well." 

As you can probably tell, the basic card was formed from three different papers: striped, green, yellow. I started by stamping the tree on the yellow patterned paper, using a green ink (masculine collage stamp set from HOTP). I then took a smaller embellishment from the same set and stamped it twice near the base of the tree for the illusion of grass. Next, I took a brown pen and drew an outline of the trunk and branches to make them stand out a bit more.  I used the same pen to draw around the edge of the background papers, making it look like there's a very narrow brown mat.

The leaf in the upper left corner is a semi-embossed metallic leaf from my stash - I think I cut it from a DCWV paper, but it was just a scrap in my stash, so I'm not certain.

The focal was a stamp from HOTP.  I stamped in brown ink on tan cardstock, cut close to the edge, and popped it up on foam tape for dimension.  It is matted on a yellow patterned rectangle (with rounded corners) and that is mounted on the blue piece.  The blue was a piece that was embossed before I traced around a Spellbinder's die and cut it out (I wanted it to be visible around the yellow mat, so needed it a bit wider than I would have gotten had I just cut the blue with the die itself).  I punched a hole in each end to thread the ribbon through to complete my card.