So Shelli Challenge # 1

Did you know that Shelli Gardner co-founder and CEO of Stampin Up! has a blog? I was so excited when I found out! Shelli is awesome! You should check it out! She calls it So Shelli. So on her blog she has a monthly challenge that she calls her creative challenge. It's for demo's and customers. And since I'm sadly not a demo anymore (long story) but I am still a very happy customer I had to participate. I am so glad I did! I love my creation. *grin* The challenge is to create a project (page, card, box, anything really) with a celebration theme. I decided, birthday card. (I know, original right?) So for my creation I decided to start with searching my stamps for something that said celebrate. Would you beleive I don't have much? Seriously, I have over 100 stamp sets (I know, what can I say? I'm addicted.) and very few of them say celebrate. In fact, only 3 stamps, out of all 100+ sets! Crazy, I know. What does this tell you? I need to buy more sets! hehe All 3 of those stamps though are teeny tiny (read, everyday flexible phrases size) and I wanted something slightly bigger. So I put that quest aside for a little bit and chose my focal image. I went with the jumping frog from the Unfroggetable set. I know, retired, but I love that set! It's one I don't think I will ever part with. I love using certainly celery with the frogs so I chose that as my card base. I then looked through my patterened paper and I found my pack of Bali Breeze. I have been hoarding this paper because I love it! I decided this was the perfect project to use it for. Then I attached my peice of Bali Breeze and used the crafters tool kit to pierce holes around the paper in a zig zag pattern. (Yes, I did it by hand even though I recently found my sewing machine peddle. But I like the hand done look better) I used black thread to tie in the Basic Black CS and then did some more stitching on the bottom of my focal peice. My focal image was stamped using Staz-On Black onto Whisper White CS and watercolored using my Certainly Celery Stampin Write Marker and my aquapainter. Then I outlined it using the marker to highlight it. I went around the outside of the frog with my Going Gray WWC and an aquapainter to give it the shadow effect. My focal image is mounted on Basic Black and Taken With Teal CS. I added some black gingham ribbon and used dimensionals to elevate my focal peice and there you have it! Or, almost. I loved the card but I had to tie in the celebrate theme from Shelli's challenge. Hmmm.... I didn't want to use any of the stamps I have so I pulled out my trusty rub-ons. I have 3 sets of the rub-ons from Sell-A-brations and guess what? One of the rub-on peices is the word celebrate! Just big enough! Wohoo! So I used that for the bottom corner of the card. And there you have it, a fun birthday card! (the inside is stamped with a birthday sentiment from It's Your Birthday)

So, you wanna see the card?
Thanks for a great challenge Shelli!