SUO Challenge #61 – True Blue!

12 / 25 / 1212 / 29 / 12

Here we are posting our biweekly challenge on Christmas Day. A very Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate this holiday!

But whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, the Solstice, Kwanzaa, or any of a number of midwinter observances, one color that frequently seems to appear in greetings and decorations is Blue.

The good news is that Blue is a welcome color for a greeting card or gift no matter what the holiday or the season. So, to help us transition from the 2012 December holidays into the new year of 2013, what better theme for a challenge than the color blue! And any blue works just fine for us, whether it's a current or retired Stampin' Up! color!

I had to go count the blues I could find in my collection of catalogs, and found seven colors with the word "blue" in their names: Baja, Bashful, Ballet (retired), Bordering (r), Brilliant (r), Brocade (r) and Bliss (r). But there are so many more colors that, whether or not they are blue in name, are certainly blue in color, and several of them are in our Design Team Members' cards this week.

Your challenge – and we hope you accept it! – is to find a blue (or blues! no limit!) that you particularly like and then enter your project in our final challenge for 2012! We hope that our True Blue Design Team Members' samples will help you get started!

To participate in our challenge, make a card or other paper-crafted 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 December 24, 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 or in any other project included in your blog post 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: December 25, 2012 (3 am USA Eastern Time) –

January 5, 2013 (9 am USA Eastern Time)

SUO Challenge #60, A Season of Glitter – Our Top 3

12 / 24 / 1212 / 24 / 12

With most of us in the midst of holiday preparations these past two weeks, we were pleasantly surprised at all the entries that we had for our "Season of Glitter" challenge. Thanks everyone for fantastic entries by all of you! It was delightful looking at all these projects and trying to come up with our Top 3 – and difficult as I'm sure you can imagine.

I hope you enjoyed visiting all the blogs and galleries that were represented by our entrants as much as we did. But, as always, we do name a Top 3 who, this time, are:

Cathy Parlitsis. This is a stunningful elegant wedding card with the Silver Glimmer paper beautifully accenting the Whisper White card stock and its texture. Gorgeous!

Christy Stanford. We all loved the overall shimmer of the central element, which really does a fab job of highlighting the colors. The green card stock as well as the blue and red Patterns papers highlighted the stamped colors beautifully!.

Yapha Mason. What a fun New Year's Card with all that sparkle against the black background. We especially liked the and the black patterns papers scallops which nicely accented the entire card.

SUO Challenge #60 – A Season of Glitter!

12 / 11 / 1212 / 14 / 12

No matter what holiday or holidays you celebrate this time of the year, I'm sure that Glitter is a fun part of it! The good thing for us here at Stampin' Up! Only Challenges is that Stampin' Up! knows how important Glitter is to us papercrafters this time of the year. There is so much available for us to use to sparkle up our projects!

Your challenge for our last post before Christmas is to make a project that features Glitter as an important part of the design. You can see that most of us were focused on winter and the holidays – especially trees and snowflakes! But we did not all choose to make holiday cards, either! So feel free to let your imaginations go anywhere you wish – but make sure to add glitter!

The guidelines and link for this challenge are at the end of this post. We hope you'll get some fun inspiration from our Design Team's projects!

To participate in our challenge, make a card 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 December 10, 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!

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

12 / 11 / 12

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!