Welcome to the middle of my week.  I seem so behind this week.  I just haven’t adjusted to the new year yet.  Oh well.  Maybe next week I’ll have it together.

There really are good reasons that I feel so behind this week.  I help run the kids’ choir at our school, and this week, we have been auditioning the two choirs for our spring program.  The younger choir (K-2nd grade) is doing a musical review with 7 broadway songs, and the older choir (3rd-5th grade) are doing a short 40 minute musical.  If you can’t tell, I’m really excited.  Yesterday we auditioned the younger choir, and tomorrow is the big one.  Casting is really hard, cause they are all good kids and you want them all to be happy.

Anyway, back to the art, or at least the paper piecing.

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Our first challenge today was brought to us by Friday Mashup!, and boy did they give us a doozy this week of a challenge.  They were asking that we mashup both, a project featuring a Super Hero, and a storybook layout.  Yeah, I told you it was a doozy.

Thank goodness, I had a sort of super hero stamp set from Fiskars

called Kapow.  It at least was a good leaping off place for this difficult challenge.  I did this strange ink blending technique with both a Distressed Ink tumbled glass, and festive berries where I divid the page up.  I added a little antique linen to the white areas and the sides, then stamped in the six different areas with my super hero stamps.  I pulled out My Favorite Things Let’s Hang Out Stamp set and stamped the girl in making a normal girl my super

hero (cause lets be honest being a little girl is hard and more of them need to feel ‘super’).  I added a few dimensional stars and called it a day.  I don’t know if I managed to capture the mashup correctly, but if the challenge had been to use stars…I would have nailed it.

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Next we have a challenge coming in from Jingle Belles where I got my first Christmas card for 2016 done.  Yeah I know we just finished the holidays, but

at Jingle Belles, it is christmas cards year round.  This week they wanted to highlight something new we were working with, and something old from our stash.

Well, my new Big shot die cutting machine is hands down my favorite new toy, especially the embossing folders, so that is my something new.  Then I pulled out some really old xmas paper and clipped out our polar bear friend.  Nothing I own in my stash is older than paper.  I have a lot of it from when I scrapped book my kids baby photos a bazillion years ago, and never seem to be able to make a dent in it.  I don’t even know how old the paper is, but it is somewhere between 5-7 years if I was guessing.  I blended some distress ink on the raised parts of the embossing and kept everything simple.

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Finally today we have our first Valentine’s card of the season coming from Sunday Stamps.  They gave us a fun soft color challenge to get us started on all things Love.  The soft blush, bright pink, white and kraft seemed to be the perfect jumping off place.

I pulled out a sweet little gal from CC Designs and stamped her out using tuxedo black Momento ink.  I colored her in using my Spectrum Noir markers.  I pulled out a piece of kraft paper, and

soft blush paper and cut them both down a little so the white of the A2 card would still be seen.  Finally I embossed the pink paper with a Sizzix embossing folder to give it a little something more.  But it just didn’t feel like it was enought so I took a hot pink ink pad and rubbed it over the raised bits trying to add a little more.  I like how it turned out.  A few dimensional stickers, and unfortunately (I wished I hadn’t done it) pearl paint and we were basically done.  I just needed to add the ‘I love you’ and I think we ended up with a sweet little card perfect for the holidays.

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Okay, now I have to run so I can prep for tomorrow’s auditions from the big choir.  Till then…