SUO Challenge #62 – New Toys!

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Finally we're getting around to a new challenge here at SUO Challenges! Your Design Team Coordinator is delighted to be back at the computer, not to mention healithily crafting to my heart's content! Our Design Team Members have been champing at the bit to get their challenge cards out for you all to see, too, so I won't delay a moment longer.

The challenge for this time? As the title says – bring out your New Toys! If you've placed an order from the Stampin' Up! Spring Catalog, go for it! But even if you just have something in your stash that's new to you and you just need to break it out and finally use it, go for it. New to Stampin' Up!? Then EVERYthing's new for you! So use whatever your heart desires!

And now for our Design Team's Creations!

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 January 14, 2013, 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: January 15, 2013 (3 am USA Eastern Time) –

January 26, 2013 (9 am USA Eastern Time)

SUO Challenge #61, True Blue – Our Top 3!

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Even though it's been awhile since we posted this challenge, it's been hard to miss that gorgeous sea of blue that filled the last SUO Challenge Blog Post. I couldn't have imagined a better response to this challenge. Who knew so many loved blue?!

And now, finally, after a bit of a delay, we'd like to name our Top 3 for our last challenge. Don't forget to pick up a copy of the code for our "Top 3" winner that you can place on your blog side bars!

Julie Gearinger. This set of sympathy cards is amazing. We expecially loved that Julie included instructions for the basic brayering technique for the cards and showed us so many ways to use our final stamped product. Definitely stunning!

Julie Fields. Julie's Baby Wipes technique is just gorgeous! Not only that, the way that Julie divided her card into sections really made this card feel like a work of art

Lynn Starzl. That Henry card is so cute with the arrow clip to "point" us in the correct direction for extending Henry's wonderful trunk! Lynn's masking was spot on, too, making this a treasure of a card.

SUO Challenge #61 – True Blue!

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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

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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.