SUO Challenge #59, Know When to Fold ‘Em – Our Top 3!

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We're a bit late in getting our Top 3 post out this time around – but here it is! We were all so impressed with all the different folds you entered in this challenge, and certainly pleased that some of you chose to use a Design Team tutorial! Imitation is definitely the sincerest form of flattery when it comes to paper crafting!

Again it was hard to pick our top three – we had to go through a couple of tie-breaking exercises! And so many of you received votes. We are certainly very fortunate in having each and every one of you enter our challenges!

Congratulations to our Folding Challenge Top 3!

De Williamson. What a beautifully creative "primitive" punch art picture, which is a great focal point for the easel card with a twist.

Donna Centamore. This is a gorgeous take on Karen Barber's M fold with the extra panel to make it stand up. We also loved the fussy cut of the Snow Festival Deer – and the sparkly antlers! What fun!

Diane Vander Galien. This is another beautiful take on a tutorial provided by one of our design team, Cindy Elam. And we were impressed with the envelope that Diane made for this lovely card!

SUO Challenge #55 – Mmmm, Feel that Texture! And there’s blog candy involved!

10 / 2 / 1210 / 3 / 12

This month is a milestone for the Stampin' Up! Only Challenge Design Team as we are beginning our 3rd year of challenges!

Of course, we wouldn't be here without all of you who enter those challenges and provide a great opportunity for all of our readers to see lots of fun and fabulous samples of Stampin' Up! Only projects! So congratulations to all of you for keeping this challenge going!

To really show our appreciation, the design team is offering blog candy for each of our Top 3 entrants for this challenge! But first, you might want to know what the challenge is (if you haven't guessed it from the title of this post): it's to make a project that has texture to it. As you can see from our Design Team's samples, texture can take many forms. But the most frequent of those forms is texture that's created with Stampin' Up!'s Textured Impressions Embossing Folders! So an embossing folder of your choice is our blog candy this time around.

All you have to do is enter your project (card, scrap page, 3-D project) with some texture in it, and, in about 2 weeks, our Design Team will choose the Top 3 designs from all the entries. Once your project has been selected as a Top 3, I'll be in touch to find out which currently-available Stampin' Up! Embossing Folder you'd like. I'll order it for you and send it off to you as soon as I get it from Stampin' Up!

Now onto our Design Team's inspirations to get you started on our challenge!

Robin's Project

Jennifer's Project

Mary's Project

Cindy E's Project

Deb's Project

Connie's Project

Karen's Kreation

Heidi's Project

Pam's Project

To participate in our challenge, make a card or other project and post a photo of it to your blog or a gallery on the internet. Then come back here and use our link tool at the bottom of this post to share the photo with us! We're looking for cards posted to the internet after October 1, 2012, and (of course!) made with Stampin' Up! products only. The products may be those that are in current catalogs, or they may be retired products. But (as our blog title says) SUO – Stampin' Up! Only! This means that Products from other papercrafting, rubber stamp, die-making or other companies may not be included in your project if Stampin' Up! sells a like product. For example, Stampin' Up! does not sell sewing thread. So use of sewing thread from another company is just fine. Stampin' Up! does sell the Sizzix Big Shot, so use of die-cuts, texture plates or other such products from another company is not fine. If you have a question, please send an e-mail to our Coordinator, Robin Messenheimer, and she'll be glad to answer it!

Challenge Dates: October 2, 2012 (3 am USA Eastern Time) –

October 13, 2012 (9 am USA Eastern Time)

SUO Challenge #54, For the Kids – Our Top 3!

10 / 2 / 12

If projects both from our Design Team as well as from our entrants this week are any indication, there are a lot of lucky children out there who are going to receive some really great paper-crafted projects! As always, we had a lot of fun chatting about all the projects, but, as always, we have managed to pick a Top 3 from a really wonderful group of projects!

So here are our Top 3 picks for Challenge #54! Click on a photograph to learn more about each project from the designer's blog.

Melissa Davies. We thought using the truck stamp as a dump truck and having the contents spill over to the base of the card was a fab idea! Of course, using the framelit for the shape of the card and the creative cutting of the "rocks" were equally creative. Sigh. Some of us have more of the creative genes that others!

Shana Gaff. Aren't these "happy colors" picked out by a child just the greatest?! And then the card itself with its creative design is such a fun idea!

Julie Cluff. This bag with the coordinating tag made us smile – and those yellow spider eyes are perfect! You definitely should check out Julie's video on how to make this whole project!

A Special Invitation for Stampin’ Up! Only Challenge #46!

4 / 29 / 124 / 27 / 12

Sometimes when you're involved in something that's as much fun and as much of a success as the SUO Challenge Blog, you get into what might seem to be a bit of a rut. Post a challenge – get beautiful entries – oooh and aaah over the entries – select a top 3 – start all over again! Actually, not a bad routine at all!

But we've decided to break out of our routine a bit and invite some of you to be Guest Designers for a Special Edition of SUO Challenges! Those whom we're inviting are those of you who have been frequent contributors to our challenge over the last six months. We've decided that "frequent" means those of you who have contributed at least six projects to our challenge since November 2011. So we are very happy to invite the following contributors to be a Guest Designer for our May 29th Challenge.

Diane Hilborn
Julie Fields (Julz)
Kris Lynch
Bonnie Klass
Denise Pustelniak
Vannessa (Saffire's Stamping)
Jenny Greefhorst
Paula Sievers
Lisa Martz

I would like each of you to contact me by e-mail, and I will tell you the theme for the challenge and let you know about our deadline and other administrative details. If you choose not to participate, that's just fine – we want everyone to have fun with this challenge blog, so there are no requirements of you other than that projects be, of course, Stampin' Up! Only!

And if your name is not on this list and you'd like it to be, don't worry! We are going to do this regularly going forward, and the next time will not require an almost two-year wait!