Something Blue & More or Less White Space

Hello there!  I hope your weekend is off to a good start.  Today I'm sharing two cards I created for two different challenges.  The first challenge is the Fusion Challenge: Something Blue, I chose to use only the cake as my inspiration.  The second challenge is the Addicted to CAS Challenge: Petals. Am I the only one who struggles with white space on a card?  I take that back, I think it may be that I might have a hard time with spacing things out.  For example, I made my first card on the left below with the intentions of having a lot of white space (you see how that worked out).  Once I stamped my large main flowers I felt that I needed to "fill in" to balance my design, then once I was done stamping, I wasn't sure I even like it because I thought it might be too busy.  Soooo, I made another card trying for more white space, this time was better but I had to hold myself back so I wouldn't add more.  It's not that I don't like white space and CAS cards, I do!  Maybe for ME, I just like color more. I would consider both of my cards clean & simple (CAS) since they're mostly one layer cards with the exception of the die cut hello.  For both cards I started out with a white card base and stamped the My Favorite Things Pretty Posies onto a white cardstock panel using the colors new leaf, limeade ice, spring rain, enchanted evening, hawaiian shores and marina mist (SU).   First I stamped the outlines of the flowers and leaves and then I stamped the colors slightly off centered.  I also stamped the friend sentiment from the MFT stamp set Label Maker Sentiments.  Once my stamping was done, I die cut my stamped panel using the MFT hello die and also die cut the hello from a piece of fun foam to layer the two together.  I did some ink blending on both of the die cut hello words before gluing them to the fun foam, marina mist & enchanted evening on my first card and hawaiian shores & marina mist on my second.  Below I have a simple slide show of some of the steps I took to create my dimensional die cut hello sentiment.

One of the funnest things for me while making these two cards was the finishing details, adding the blue and silver sequins, some white gel pen to the tiny dots around some of the flowers, using a silver glitter pen to add dots in the daisy flowers and some Wink of Stella glitter pen on a few of the flowers. Thanks for stopping by!