One of A Kind

By the time this post goes live, I should be on an airplane headed to CHA! Woohoo!! I'm so excited to see all the latest and greatest in the industry and even more, to meet other stamping friends who will be there! I promise I'll take pictures (which is much better than being IN them).
Today I have two projects. Both of my Saturday challenges are sketches this week. And fun ones! This first card is my sample for Jen del Muro's Sketch For You To Try. Take a peek at the sketch over on i{heart}2stamp. That little area in the upper right where the horizontal band starts out as the top layer on the left side, but goes behind another layer on the right side (I'm probably not explaining it very well) gave me fits! On my card, the solid red horizontal strip's disappearance behind the red dotted vertical strip just looked too abrupt. I decided to add the burlap string to literally and figuratively tie it together. I can't wait to see what the other SFYTT girls did in that area. Speaking of SFYTT girls, there's a new kid on the block. Please give some love to the newest sketch sampler, the fabulous Kelly Lunceford (aka atomicbutterfly on SCS)!

Jen del Muro and guest designer Kirsten DuBosque
Amy Rohl
Carole Burrage
Kelly Lunceford
Shannan Teubner
Susan Liles

Wanna give the sketch a try? Just upload your project to your blog or SCS (SCS keyword is SFYTT), then link up your creation to Jen's post. Hope you can play along! And here's something all you SFYTT fans won't want to miss: Jen has a blog blinkie for the SFYTT sketches now! To add it to your blog, all you need to do is follow the instructions HERE. I{heart}sketches ... how 'bout you?

The adorable daisy and ladybug image is from Anna Wight's new Fish Friends set, available at Whipper Snapper Designs. The sentiment is from Friendly Expressions, also one of Anna's new sets. I stamped on white and colored with Prismacolors and Gamsol. I stamped the image a second time, colored and trimmed out the flower only and adhered it on top of the first one with dimensionals. The sentiment banner is just a little bit contoured so it bows outward in the middle. The paper is Twitterpated by Imaginesce.

Next up is my sample for this week's sketch challenge at Our Creative Corner. Our January host, Jennifer Meyer, put this one together. I thought it would be perfect to use with these two fish, also from the Fish Friends set. The sentiment is from Friendly Expressions.



I watercolored the circles first, using a Taken With Teal re-inker (I know, can you believe?! I might even need to re-order Taken With Teal card stock with my next Stampin' Up order ... who'd have thought?). The fish are stamped separately, watercolored (Summer Sun, More Mustard, and Really Rust), trimmed out, and coated with Crystal Effects. The bubbles are a separate stamp and I stamped those onto the backgrounds, then dotted one set of bubbles with Crystal Effects. Why not the other? I forgot :) Except for the two brads, all those Taken With Teal circles on the middle panel are just punched 1/2" and 1/4" circles coated with Crystal Effects. The designer papers are from Nana's Nursery Baby Boy Collection by DCWV.

Don't forget to take a look at what the other OCC designers came up with. You can see all the samples together on the OCC blog, as well as individually on the designers' personal blogs:

Cindy Haffner
Dawn Easton
Denise Marzec
Jackie Pedro
Jennifer Meyer
Julee Tilman
Kim Teasdale
Laurie Schmidlin
Lynda Benden
Silke Ledlow

A special welcome and thanks to Carla, aka cmsuto, who joins us as our guest designer this week!

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great weekend!