How my cards evolve

I am really struck by the clean and simple cards on the Less Is More blog challenge and decided to do a card along with their theme for this week.  Once I saw what their theme is though, I almost chickened!  It's masculine and I really don't do masculine cards.  I struggle so hard with them, it is really about the only time I don't enjoy my hobby.

Anyway, I thought stop being a wimp and do it - I don't have to enter the challenge do I.  So I had a couple of thoughts about what I would do, and settled on this one.  I'm going to do this in classic awards style and do the card I like best first and the ones that I thought weren't so good last!

And the winner is:

And the winner is!

Although I'm not entirely happy with the placing of the embossed circle on the card, I like the overall idea.  I used the punched out bit from one of my first attempts as the 3d bird as I'd decided I like the colour combo. 

My first attempt wasn't too bad, but then I realised that you can't emboss a nestie once you've put the 3d part of the card on!  So this was embossed by hand with the nestie - not a success!

3rd place goes to: my first attempt

Next time I embossed the card blank first, then stamped, then layered, then did the greeting.  Again not too bad, but I still thought not too sure.

2nd place goes to: my 2nd attempt

I was trying to place the brown bird somewhere on the above card, and it just wasn't working.  I had a lightbulb moment, do it again with a green branch and brown bird.  New card blank, embossed, stamped, 3d bird ,changed the greeting and hey presto - my winning card.

I am so glad I'm joining in with the Less is More challenge (even if it is only on my own blog), it's really making me challenge what I do on my cards, and isn't that the point of a challenge?

I will be back soon with more cards in a style I'm more comfortable with.  Am off to do the dreaded housework, then play cards!

Huge congrats if you've managed to get to the end of this mammoth post - next time will be shorter I promise!

Sarah