SUO Challenge 71, Favorite Retiring Sets – Our Top 3!

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Once again, thank you all for your delightful entries celebrating your favorite retiring or retired Stampin' Up! Stamp Sets. Here we are at the beginning of the new year, many of us waiting breathlessly for our first order from the new catalog. But we also love to go back and look at past favorites – even if they're from the near past!

So many of you received votes from our Design Team this time around it was hard just to pick a Top 3. But we did, and here they are! Just click on the pictures if you'd like to read more about their projects on their blogs.

Gloria Steger. We all loved all the details on this card – it's a great all-around card, even if Gloria did call it Christmas in May! The soft coloring is lovely, and the whole design makes for a very clean-looking card!

Shanna Gaff. We loved the use of the Vellum and how it softens the coloring behind the sentiment. One of our design team members offered, "It's always better with Vellum!" Such a lovely color combination, too!

Gayle Wheeler. First of all, I think that little bird is so darned cute – it's got to make anyone who looks at it smile! We also loved the free-form hills, and the use of the retiring Clouds Embossing Folder, just embossing a part of the sky. Overall a delightful picture!

SUO Challenge 71 – Favorite Retiring Stamp Sets!

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By the time we issue our next challenge here at the Stampin' Up! Only Challenges blog, dozens of favorite stamp sets will have been retired by Stampin' Up! But this happens every year – twice a year for awhile there! – and so most of us are used to this time of transition. This doesn't make it any easier for those of use who are SU! Demonstrators to say, "Goodbye," to our favorites. Of course, if you're not a demonstrator (and even if you are) you may keep all your favorites around for years and years.

As all of our current SUO Challenge Design Team Members are Stampin' Up! Demonstrators, my challenge to them was to use their favorite stamp set that is retiring this year. For the rest of you, we'd really like to see your favorites that are retiring this year – but you may use any retired Stampin' Up! stamp set that is a favorite to enter Challenge 71.

The challenge rules and deadlines are at the end of this blog post. One thing I'd like to emphasize is that, as the SUO Challenges Coordinator, I'm here to help you if you have problems getting your entries posted. Just send me an e-mail (link below) and we'll get things fixed up!

Finally, once again we are saying, "Goodbye," not to a stamp set but to one of our Design Team Members. Cindy Elam has been a treasure for all of us, and I'm really going to miss her style here at SUO Challenges! But she's not leaving the Stampin' Up! community, and I'm sure we'll have lots of chances to see her work, even if it's not here. She does have one last design for us, though. I hope you'll enjoy it as well as the projects of all of the other Design Team members!

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.

PLEASE remember this: We're looking for projects posted to the internet AFTER May 20, 2013. This is a NEW challenge!

And, of course, your projects should be 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: May 21, 2013 (3 am USA Eastern Time) –

June 1, 2013 (6 am USA Eastern Time)

SUO Challenges 70, Butterflies – Our Top 3!

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After we posted this challenge, it was almost a week before I made anything with other than Butterflies. They really do add so much to greeting cards and other projects!

Thanks to all of you who entered this challenge – there are so many great ideas for using Stampin' Up!'s Butterfly products that I'm sure many of us will be using a lot going forward. But, as always, we do have to select our Top 3 entrants – difficult this week as it always is!

So please enjoy once more the creations of our Top 3 Designers for this latest SUO Challenge!

Kathy Tanner. We all loved the chalkboard technique and the way that Kathy colored the butterfly so softly that it looks right at home on the chalkboard. This is a beautifully laid out card, with great use of the space.

Fiona Whitten. The butterflies definitely take center stage as they dance across this card! You really do have to go to her blog to see the store front that inspired this card. We really loved how Fiona caught the same feeling as on the store front, and all the colors that she used to make this card.

Gloria Steger. What a fun design – and all the colors that she used make this just a gorgeous work of art! And, with all the beautiful details, including the white embossing, Gloria definitely made the butterfly the focal point of the design.

SUO Challenge 70 – Butterflies Are So Much Fun!

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I personally am so pleased that Stampin' Up! has chosen to keep my favorite Butterfly products for the 2013-2014 Catalog year. I just love what we can do with the Punches, Sizzlits, Sizzix Die, and Stamp Sets (including the Best of Butterflies that will be around for the next year!). And obviously our Design Team has fun with the Stampin' Up! Butterflies, too!

You may notice a couple of new names in the group today. Yes, we have TWO new Design Team members joining us as of this week's SUO Challenge, and we are so excited to be introducing them to you today. You'll recognize one of them as someone who has participated in some of our challenges. And the other is completely new to SUO Challenges. We're thrilled to have them both join us.

Deena Boos. Her blog is My Home Grown Art.

I am a wife to a wonderful husband (who puts up with my crazy craftiness) and a mother of two children; a teenage boy, and a newly grown-up girl.

I fell in love with paper crafting the minute I put my first stamp to paper, at a Stampin’ Up! class, and I became a Stampin’ Up! Demonstrator only one week after that! My passion for paper crafting, and sharing with others, has now been going on for nearly 7 years.

I have enjoyed playing along with SU-Only Challenges, and now I’m thrilled to be a part of such a talented group, who share the same love for paper crafting as I do.

Justin Krieger. His blog is JK Cards.

I’m a techie that does computer consulting. I live in Long Island, NY and I have a wonderful daughter Taylor and Mini Schnauzer Winston.

I have always done some kind of paper crafting ever since I was little when I made entire car dashboards out of oaktag. I discovered my love of card making in January of 2010 while watching a show on PBS. I saw them make a waterfall card and I thought I can do that so I went out and got some supplies and made one.

My friend introduced me to Stampin’ Up! in August of that year and I became an Independent Demonstrator in September. I’m completely hooked and take some time to make something every day. It relaxes me and is my wind down at the end of the day!

I'm sure you'll be as happy as the Design Team is to welcome their new styles to the bi-weekly SUO Challenge Blog! Here are their entries for the Butterflies Are So Much Fun challenge – and we're looking forward to seeing your entries! The link to enter is at the end of the blog.