Sweet Little Buggie

After spending all that time earlier fixing those broken links on the blog, I finally got some time to stamp and create tonight. (YAY!) The boys all went to bed earlier than usual tonight - even the baby, and he even took a nap today like normal. I noticed that the kids were a little more tired today after school. I was mentioning that to a friend this afternoon and we were both thinking that they were probably still a little tired from running outside yesterday all afternoon in the freakish 70 degree weather we had yesterday. :) It was great and so wonderful to be outside until dinner time. But how about this... we are supposed to get clobbered with snow here on the EC Friday morning starting at 6-ish AM. We'll see... I really hope the weather guys are off the mark on this one. I so want the spring to be here already (stomping my foot for emphasis here). Wednesday was such a tease!!

Oh yeah, so back to my card! LOL

I combined 2 of the SCS weekly challenges into 1. This week I combined SC and CC. These challenges, like I mentioned before, have been going on for quite awhile (a few years now, I think), but I have only started doing them in the last few months, and not always very consistently at all. But that is another thing that I hope to work on and I hope this blog will help me (or at the very least, guilt me... just kidding, but not really that much!).

Stamps Used: Inky Antics and "sweet" sentiment from SU So Very
Ink/CS Used: Cool Caribbean, Chocolate Chip, Really Rust, So Saffron (craft), Old Olive
Accessories: CB/Tiny Bubbles Embossing Folder and Tiny Tags Die, So Saffron Eyelets, Crop-A-Dile, Ribbon, Paper Snips, 1/2 in and 1 1/4in Circle Punches, Really Rust Button, Dimensionals, Prismas and Gamsol, Copper Cording

I love this little girl buggie. I didn't think it was my style at first, but the more I saw samples made with this stamp, the more I liked her. She is definitely one of my most used IA stamps behind the boy-themed ones. She has been perfect for the girl classmate birthday cards I need for the boys.

So, there were more colors that usual in the CC challenge this week (at least that what it seemed to me). But I really liked how they came together. But I definitely had a much harder time with the layout. Going into it, I thought that I was going to be able to use this large flower that I had bought a while back from OTC, but when it came time to lay out the card, it was waaayyy too big and really made the card un-balanced. But I had to find some embellishment to take its place b/c that was a major component of the layout challenge. It took me a long time to figure something out. In the end, I basically "made" up a flower using a punch out of the same stamp I used for the BG of the horizontal panel but just on Cool Caribbean paper and then used the button for the center of the flower. I layered the whole "flower" on an Old Olive circle to kinda ground it make it and feel like the bud. I also bent her wings upward a bit to give it a little more dimension. I think it kinda worked out, right?...