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 #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!

SUO Challenge #59 – Know When to Fold ‘Em

11 / 27 / 1211 / 27 / 12

As much as I love making cards to send to friends and family, I love folding those cards in some other way that just in half. It's a really fun surprise to open an envelope and pull out an unexpected fold. Sometimes they're simple folds, and sometimes they're a bit more on the complicated side. But they're always fun!

No matter what kind of a fold you use for a card, the card can range from cute and fun to gorgeous and elegant, and everywhere in between – as you can see from the creations offered by our Design Team for this challenge.

Now we're ready to see what you like to do with your favorite folds! Whether they're popular or not-so-well-known, quick and easy or something that takes a bit of time and patience – we'd love to see them all! The link tool to showcase your creation is at the end of this post, along with a summary of the "rules" for Stampin' Up! Only Challenges.

Connie's Project

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 November 26, 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 #58 – A Clean and Simple Holiday Card

11 / 13 / 1211 / 13 / 12

There's only a month and a half left until Christmas and even less time left until Hanukkah! Do you have YOUR holiday cards done?

This is the time of the year when some of us are desperate for some great ideas for Clean and Simple – CAS – designs that we are able to complete quickly but still end up with a beautiful greeting card. Our design team members have come up with some fabulous CAS ideas, and I know that you can, too!

So that's all your challenge is this time – create and share with us a lovely holiday card that's clean and simple. Not too many embellishments, not too many layers, not too many steps. In fact, some of the most beautiful cards I've seen have had no layers, and lots of open space, drawing our attention to a small but elegant element on the card. I really can hardly wait to see all your ideas!

To get you started, I hope you'll enjoy our Design Team's Clean and Simple designs!

To participate in our challenge, make a card or other 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 November 12, 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!

Challenge Dates: November 13, 2012 (3 am USA Eastern Time) –

November 24, 2012 (9 am USA Eastern Time)