Color Challenge & Mother's Day "Half & Half" Cards

Made my Mother's Day cards for the "Half and Half' challenge today - 20 of them, all florals but used the colors in my color challenge for most of them. Getting better at heat embossing and tried some water color/pencil on the yellow one. I don't know: with me, "less is more" but I am looking forward to learning new techniques for my cards at Traci's class tomorrow and through Stampin' Up!

Climb Every Mountain: Sketch Challenge #6

First I linked my entire post to the S&S blog... no, Caro, that's not how you do it. Then I visited a blog on S&S to comment on how lovely the card was and it did all kinds of crazy shenanigans to my poor laptop which took about 20 minutes to recover and much "rebooting" so maybe this card isn't meant to be ;) I have a glass of wine now (Facebook: A Glass of Wine Solves Everything) and if Facebook is right (and we know it always is!), I might get this right in the next 20 minutes.

Skipped last week's sketch as I was busy pondering my color challenge and this one was a bit challenging. I try not to look at the other cards that have been done, or not many of them, but again am in a "guy" mode (for the last time till Dad's Day cards next month) having done the shirt card a couple weeks ago and then the "gender neutral" (is that the appropriate term?) or masculine cards for most of my "15/15" cards last week. Shirt card will be reprised for Father's Day. This "thank you," "gracias," "merci" card is meant to be a card for a guy to send a guy. I used double sided scraps of Quick Quotes paper and colored in a few of the stripes and the "bullseye" area of the message circle with Copic Red 46.

Stampin' Up

Wow! am I impressed with myself.. or rather with Mary Anne, the Stampin' Up goddess whose club I joined this morning. First "official" month is April but she let me play with one of this month's cards and I can tell my cardmaking is going to a whole new level. DH (Dear Husband) was massively impressed with my first venture. I will have to diss my cardio-aerobics class once a month for this (everything I want to do interferes with that!) but exercising your brain is important too and from what I saw today, my creative thinking cap will be going full steam.. I don't "learn" easily but once I "get" it, game on! So much to DH's dismay I will be deep into a Stampin' Up catalog tonight and now have 3 regular "clubs"/crops a month for scrapping, cardmaking, etc. and several miscellaneous ones (including of course cardmaking for S&S) so as you can tell, adding in aerobics twice a week, lunch on Friday and catching up on trash TV ("Real Housewives, etc.), I'm simply too busy to work ;) I do however appreciate my pittance paying internet travel job that will fund some stamps every month....

I love the embossing on the envelope too.. and the "pop dot" double layer flowers. I have a Big Shot but I think I'm going to invest in one of the new "embossing only" cutie smaller machines that Sizzix has come out with to use for cards.. it looks way easier than messing with the big sandwich and is compact enough to tote around... heading to joann.com....