Beary Nice

Dear Reader

I've had quite a crafty weekend. Up early this morning so got the essentials of life out of the way and started on the good stuff! Made a few more ATC's for the May RWS Challenge, then altered an Ikea mirror for the new craft room. That seemed to come together quickly (I'll post it tomorrow) so decided to make a card. I'd had a look at the Magnolia Challenge blog yesterday morning and there was a post saying that they had come 5th in a poll of the top 30 challenge blogs. Well I thought the top five place was lovely for them and well deserved too. I'm very fond of the Magnolia Challenge - as you know I love my elves! But what surprised me a bit was that they'd printed all the top thirty blogs for us all to go and visit. Which was extremely kind of them and perhaps it's me and I've been in the business world too long but isn't the main point of their Challenge blog to get people to enter their competition, not other peoples, and so use Magnolia images? Anyway,I'd had a wonderful half an hour checking out all the various challenges and decided on three to enter, two of which I'd not come across before. So here's the card I made and it's going to go into Sketch Saturday (really lovely sketch to work with I thought so thanks to them), the Cupcake Craft Challenge which asked for 3 papers, 3 flowers and 3 ribbons and a Spoonful of Sugar Challenge which asked for a "Furry Friend (animals)"

I used tonal Craft Works papers, painted my image (Sugar Nellie) with distress inks in Tattered Rose, Spun Sugar and Victorian Velvet and made a small sentiment tag and distressed it - again with my Tim Holtz inks. Both image and tag were die cut with a Nestability. I used a large pearl brad from my stash to hold the sentiment in place. The three flowers were made using Woodware punches and I embellished with pearls from RWS. I added two rows of smaller pearls to give definition to the three papers. The ribbons are also from RWS - two are used as border edgers and one as a bow. I stickled the balloons to highlight them. Thanks for looking and please leave a comment....