Heavensent For You

Omygosh, I can't believe how far behind you can get when you skip a day or two. This keeping up with your Blog business might take a little more work.

Anyway - I continued to do the Dirty Dare challenges from last week. We have to have them uploaded by August 1st, and I have 4 more to go. I was up til 3:00 am last night (this morning?) getting through Saturday's challenges. Here are my takes on what they asked of us.

Holly ('toy', one of our Dirty Dozen at SCS) wanted us to go for layers and use this sketch. It wsn't too difficult for me. I thought of a sympathy card I needed & everything else fell into place. For sympathy cards, I don't like a whole lot of bling or embellishments on them. I look at it that you want to convey your sympathies to the individuals, give them a nice card, but not one that will distract them. That's MY view, anyway.

Sharon (notimetostamp) was looking for a Simple card so this is what I came up with:

Friday, Joan (Joan Ervin) presented us with a challenge for silhouettes. I IMMEDIATELY thought of the new stamp I got initially for the July 4th challenges, but this was the first time I really spent some time with it. I wanted the patriotic feel, so I used my brayer & loaded red on one end and blue on the opposite end, leaving a negative space in the center. This worked perfect for the red-white-blue background (I think.)

Another Friday challenge, we were to dig out "all" of our cupcake designs - for me that meant this Inkadinkadoo set - it's the only one I have. But, how perfect could this be? I didn't even realize what I was doing, or whose challenge I was following until I got the card ready for uploading. Taylor (tayloredexpressions) chose the cupcakes. Well, my daughter (yes, Taylor also) is going to turn 13 (yikes!) next week, SO, guess who's birthday card this is ... Okay, so it's not that far of a stretch - yes, my Taylor's birthday card. (Long enuf to hold that wad of money she THINKS she's getting, lol.

I absolutely fell in love with this card. Thank you so much, Julia (Julia S), for presenting us with a challenge to sew the card. I've been sewing since I was a freshman in high school (translation: MANY years), and papercrafting for at least 10. Do you think I'd ever try this, even after seeing many examples here on SCS? No, I have to be told (via challenges) what to do. I just was so happy with the results of this. Now I'm going to see if I can't find similar materials so I can make myself a quilt with these colors.

Rose Ann (cutterscallous) had us work on a Flap fold card. She wrote the tutorial that can be found [url=http://www.splitcoaststampers.com/resources/tutorials/flap_card/]. I kind of wanted the card to have a flap, but not necessarily LOOK like it had a flap. The panel with the bird actually is attached to the flap so the whole thing lifts up.

While I participated in the Make a Scene challenge - it's painfully obvious I need to work more - wait, buy more stamps so I can practice more, right? Yeah, that's the ticket! Thanks, Kittie (kittie747) for this one.

Jen (genie1314) gave us a very cool sketch to work on, and this is my offering ... Notice the main image popped onto 4 smaller squares, popped onto a rectangle shape, finally onto a square.

This challenge was from Laura (scrapnextras) and we were to distress, rip, tear, gouge (okay, gouge was MY contribution, lol)

I love this Northwoods image. After meticulously coloring it and cutting the oval out by hand, I went for it. I scrunched the vanilla cardstock a bit & then sponged chocolate over, highlighting the creases. As you can see, each subsequent layer - chocolate, garden green - each got their own "rip, tear, gouging" done to them. I sponged some more chocolate around the edges, which nearly obliterated my image, so I went back & erased a bit around the white daisies and the watering can, but left the rest to look aged. Initially I cut my ribbon nice & pretty at an angle (after distressing it by sponging more chocolate) ... but it looked to pristine even after coloring it, so I grabbed my scissors & king of 'snaggle cut' it (okay, not an official crafting term) & pulled at the edges so it would fray a bit. I'm thinking this just may look distressed, what do you think?

Well ... I started these stamps at 10:30 last night ("just one" - ahem, yeah rite!) and finished up at 3:00 ... I'll have to find some time today to finish off the Sunday challenges - I'm determined to finish them. Only one I may have a struggle with is the Primary colors one by TruCarMa. Don't get me wrong, it's a great challenge - but not colors I'm typically drawn to ... I suppose that's what a challenge is, tho, right? Going outside of your comfort zone. I'll do it, tho.

Thanks for taking another peek.

Ta-ta for now.