What a pane!

I'm not feeling this card - it turned out exactly how I thought it would and its part of my experimentation with CAS but I don't know, its just not speaking to me. Any ideas?
This card is my standard 8.5 x 5.5 in and maybe that's where I went wrong - maybe the proportion of the stamp can't support the size of the card.

I really wanted to use this set and let the pink girlie icing on the cake pop out from the dark shadows of the inside of the home. The trim actually mimics the trim of my mother's house as this was a card for her. I colored the ribbon with the copics to get a match. I decided to anchor the image with black mounted background to give the image some weight on the card. If you look closely you can see that I scored the card either side of the ribbon just to give a little more simple texture to the card.

Ingredients:
Card size - 8.5in x 5.5in
Cardstock - Neenah, The Paper Source
Stamps - Clear Dollar Stamps
Ink - Memento Tuxedo Black
Color - Copics - hopefully I will sort out my list soon - I wrote them down somewhere!
Accessories - Sakura clear glaze pen, white grosgrain ribbon.

New House, Eh?

So a dear cyberfriend decides to imigrate from the English Midlands to Canada and this is what I came up with.

I'm doing my best to experiment toward being more CAS (or clean and simple) and I hope this qualifies. I liked the idea of a bright red welcoming door and it also echo'ed the red in the Canadian flag (yeah I really do think things like that!). Plus, I remember when I was looking to sell my own home and how the home improvement shows in England said that red is a welcoming color for a front door!

With moving to a new country, new neighbourhood and new house, I imagine everything is bright and new for my dear friends family even if she is still too far north! makes me shiver just to think about it. LOL That was the thinking behind making the neighborhood nice and colorful.

So here is the finished card, what do you think?

Too much? too little? Truthfully on looking at it now, I'm thinking I should have divided the sentiment and just had one line to keep it cleaner.

Ingredients
Card size - 4.25 x 5.5 inches (Gasp! Shock! Horror! its a small card!)
Cardstock - Neenah, The Paper Source
Ink - Memento Tuxedo Black
Stamps - Stampendous "House and Home"
Copics - R20, R22, R27, R29, Y02, Y06, Y28, B000, B00, B23, B24, C1,C3,C5, BV02, BV04, G14,G17, YR04, YR07

I think it is kinda funny that such a simple looking card used so many color variations!