starting the celebration early

Tomorrow is National Scrapbooking Day! This is a brand new thing for me. I'm not actually much of a scrapbooker, and I know there IS a World Card Making Day (first Saturday in October), but I still don't want to miss out on all the FUN happening tomorrow! In particular, the Studio Calico Design Team members have each issued a challenge. I'm starting off a day early with Davinie's challenge - which I'm most excited about because she was the only one to issue a CARD CHALLENGE! :) Yay!

Plus, her rules are really basic, which I love to see since I'm new to challenges and have to work with whatever I already have around. So here are the rules:
1. Create a card.
2. Use woodgrain.
3. Use the color blue.
4. Use a punch.

Super! Here we go!

I have NO IDEA where this card came from! It's completely unlike what I normally do! But I really think I like how it turned out. The idea just came to me today at work, so I sketched it out quickly while I was waiting for the pizza dough to finish mixing :) I knew right away I would use the Core'dinations woodgrain cardstock from SC's Joyland kit. It looks awesome in this photo, but while I was working with it I actually wished the two colors were higher contrast. Oh well. This is more authentic I guess. The other bits are just scraps from my "blue" file. The letters are from Basic Grey's new Basics Manila collection (you want to get this!). The card base is Stampin' Up's Ballet Blue - and I'm really proud of myself because I usually have trouble using color card bases - A weird hang-up of mine I guess!

Thanks for looking! I hope you like what I came up with for this challenge!