SUO Challenge 34 – Our Top 3!

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I can't believe that the holidays are almost over – but I continue to be inspired to be in the holiday spirit by looking over all the fabulous projects that you all submitted in our final holiday challenge of the year – Merry and Happy and Everything Joyous! As you read earlier, the SUO Challenge Design Team is all of that – at least the Happy and Joyous! – to have Cindy Coutts back among us!

But you all outdid yourselves to show off projects that put a smile on the face of everyone who looked at them. And that certainly is a hallmark of a successful holiday project!

As always, though, we do pick three of your submissions to our challenge as our "Top Three." That's not to say that every project isn't just wonderful. But these three artists caught our special attention, and all for much different reasons:

Julie Gearinger, whose oh-so-detailed Christmas card makes us want to reach out and touch all of those textured elements! The pearls, the embossing and the vintage distressing – all these details make this just a stunning piece of art!

Winnie Hon, who made a lovely basket of goodies and decorated them so well that I would be afraid to open them to get at the treats inside for fear I'd damage them. Well, maybe not. But still – texturizing the card stock for the boxes before constructing them, and then adding on the die-cut snowflakes makes this a delight to look at!

Paula Sievers (from Australia where there aren't that many snowflakes this time of the year!) impressed us all with the way that she used the same basic layout to create some Clean and Simple pieces of art that anyone would be happy to receive in the mail!

A big "Thank You" to these three and ALL of you who submitted entries for this challenge.

SUO Challenge Design Team – An Exciting Announcement

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As many of you know, the SUO Challenge Blog was founded over a year ago by Stampin' Up! Demonstrator, Cindy Coutts. She pulled together a fun Design Team and it's been going strong ever since. Earlier this year, though, Cindy felt that she had to devote more of her time to her other exciting personal and professional endeavors, and turned the SUO Challenge Blog over to the Design Team. Shortly after that, the team asked me to be the Design Team Coordinator, and I've been having a blast doing that ever since!

Recently, though, Cindy has decided to return to her Stampin' Up! roots and is once more a Stampin' Up! demonstrator. Not only that, she has accepted our invitation to rejoin us as a member of the SUO Challenge Blog Design Team! We here at SUOC are so excited to have her back, with her great talent and all of her wonderful ideas. She's jumping right in, too, and will have a sample on the new challenge tomorrow.

I hope you will all join with me in welcoming Cindy back! It's great to have her here with us again!

SUO Challenge 34, Merry and Happy and Everything Joyous!

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It's mid-December, and all around me I hear holiday greetings. The greetings I most frequently hear are, "Merry Christmas" and "Happy Holidays." But there are many other holiday greetings that we hear this time of year – Happy Hanukkah and Joyous Kwanzaa are just two more. Whatever the greeting, though, invariably they begin with Merry, Happy, or Joyous. And it's so much fun to make cards that express those bright, cheerful and joyous feeling of the holidays. So that's what our Design Team has done for our Stampin' Up! Only Challenge 34 – some card to inspire us to be happy with whatever we're celebrating this time of the year.

And we'd love to have you join in our fun! Just create a card to celebrate a December Holiday and add a link to it at the bottom of this post. I'm sure that there are quite a few of us and many of our readers will be thrilled to have some great ideas for last minute celebration cards!

Please remember, use ONLY Stampin' Up! products and share only something that you've made in response to this challenge. For a complete list of the guidelines for the SUO Challenges, please refer to our write-up down on the left.

SUO Challenge 33, Our Top Three!

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Wow, isn't that title for this post a convergence of threes! Maybe just for giggles, we'll have a top 4 when we get to post 44. Or maybe not – just a wild thought that popped into my tired little brain!

And what a top three we have this time around! We always have trouble picking out three because all members of the design team pick THEIR top three and I have to work from there. This time, while we had lots of different opinions as usual, there was one name that was on EVERYone's list.

But that doesn't mean that each and every project shared for this challenge wasn't wonderful – they ALL are and we appreciate all of you who enter our challenges. I hope those of you who haven't clicked on the links in last week's post will take some time to do so today – it's well worth the effort!

Now for our Top Three for Challenge 33:

Kris Lynch. I just cannot imagine how anyone could look at Kris' project and not say, "Wow!" This picture is just the outside of the Peek-a-Boo Nativity that Kris created with scraps that she never throws away. You have to visit her blog post (click on the picture at the right) to see all the detail behind the doors!

Marlene Peters was also on many of our lists with her Snowflake and Scallop Circle Cards. Yes, it's cards plural! She made the same card with different colors and we were just amazed at how different each one feels. This card is my favorite among the three that she displayed on her blog.

Bonnie Klass shared with us a card that is so simple yet definitely elegant. This would be a great card for a Stampin' Up! Demonstrator to use in a workshop, and a great card for any of us to make when our time is short but we just have to have something well, elegant! The traditional Christmas colors in this card are stunning, again in their simplicity. But we could see this layout used in cards for many different occasions!