SUO Challenge #41 – Think Spring (or Autumn?)

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For most of us, we are today finding ourselves welcoming the colorful blossoms of Spring. So what better challenge to offer than to create a card or other project celebrating the arrival of all the new life that Spring brings to the Northern Hemisphere! But what about our Aussie and Kiwi friends? For those of you in the Southern Hemisphere of our lovely planet, you are headed into the cooler – but no less colorful! – season of Autumn.

Whatever season you're welcoming in the latter half of March, we challenge you to create a card showing off the colors of the season!

As always, we welcome projects made with Stampin' Up! products only. All the fine print about that is in the not-too-fine print over to the left of this blog post. Also over on the left you'll find some other important limitations, too. We will accept for consideration for our Top 3 each time only projects that are posted to the Internet (blog, gallery, wherever) AFTER this challenge goes live on March 20th. I thank all of you for being just perfect about not using your linked blog post to sell your products such as tutorials and kits. This is all for fun to get ideas out there for all of our readers about how they can use their Stampin' Up! products, and we're glad that you are entering your projects in this spirit!

To get some ideas going, here are ideas from our Design Team – all of whom live in the Northern Hemisphere, so they're featuring the season of Spring!

Cindy Elam

Mary Brown

Heidi Baks

Jennifer Timko

SUO Challenge #40 – Our Top 3!

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Once again, over half of the entries in our challenge received Top 3 votes. Your ingenuity shown in all the fab entries for "It's Fun Being Green" just amazed us all. We are just so pleased to have such talented people entering our challenge and we look forward every time to seeing what you design for us!

But, as always, we like to single out three of the entries for recognition as one of our Top 3. It's so hard, because we'd like to make it a top 6 or 7 or 8…. But not. So here are our Top 3 for this challenge. You may click on any of the pictures to go to the artist's blog for more details about her project.

Paula Sievers. Everything on this card is just fabulous! The hills outlined with the edgelits, the little rosette in the lower left corner, the sun – and all the textured elements – really make it a very special card!

Karen Szczepkowski. This card really took the idea of making the green the focal point to heart (sorry, but one of the design team said it first, so I'm not to blame for the pun). And what a unique way to use the Sprinkled Expressions Sale-a-bration stamp. Just darling!

Patty Gorka. Again, the use of Edgelits for the hills in this card was definitely unique. And that butterfly just really shows off the design of the stamp from Mixed Bunch. Finishing the card off with the diagonal grid is a perfect complement to all the other texture in the card.

SUO Challenge #40 – It’s Fun Being Green!

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(PLEASE NOTE: We will only consider for our Top 3 those projects that have been posted to your blog or other online gallery AFTER the posting date of our challenge! Please see the highlighted text below.)

Welcome to the SUO Challenge Blog 40th challenge! Every time we hit a number with a zero at the end I feel that we should have a celebration. So why not celebrate with my favorite March color – Green! And it's not just that St. Patrick's Day is in March – you'll have guessed this by looking at some of the cards from our design team even if you didn't focus on that! It's also that, at least here in the Northern Hemisphere, we'll be celebrating the first day of spring on the 20th. And if the season of Spring doesn't bring images of green, I'm not sure what would!

Have you guessed that your challenge this week is to make a card with Green as the focal point? Yup! Green it is. Now we are not the first challenge group to have green as the focus of our challenge this month, but we ask that you enter into our challenge only cards that you've posted online AFTER you've read this announcement blog post.

Even if you've already made a few cards with green for this season, I'm sure that our Design Team entries this week will inspire you to make yet another and enter it in our challenge! I've enjoyed looking at every one of them, and I'm looking forward to seeing all your entries, too!

SUO Challenge 39 – Our Top Three

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Ladies, this is getting harder and harder to do! All of us on the Design Team were overwhelmed with all the fantastic entries for our Birthday Card challenge; this was a tough one. One of our members even asked if we couldn't do a Top 5 this time around! Every single one of you who entered our challenge last time definitely had a winner of a card!

But we did finally figure out our Top 3 for this challenge (and I had to use our tie-breaker system to get there, too!). So with a virtual drum roll, please welcome the SUO Challenge Top 3 Birthday Cards! (Click on the pictures to go to the individual websites.)

Paula Sievers' gorgeous, beautifully embossed and colored roses from the Fifth Avenue Floral collection are stunning with the special fold of this birthday card – for someone very special, we're sure! Be sure to look at Paula's website to see more about the fun fold of this card!

Catherine Pooler created a fabulous "shabby chic" card with a flair that had us all looking at the details and wondering how we could do that, too! Not to worry – check out Catherine's website for a video on how to make this very card!!

Patty Gorka (aka LaLatty) gave us another card with all kinds of details that, put together, make a simple yet beautiful layout. We especially like that center cupcake with the crimped "liner" and the little button all mounted with Stampin' Dimensionals to make it stand out from the rest.