I find that I kind of dig this Monday morning thing.  I get the small people off to school and find that the few minutes I spend here typing is therapeutic before I set off to make sense of the mess from the weekend.  Someday someone is going to have to tell me how three kids who were barely home all weekend could make such a mess.

On that same note someday someone is going to have to explain to me how my daughters are able to make more dirty laundry than I do.  They in theory wear one outfit a day and one night gown.  They don’t work out or have some random sports activity (my middle one swims three days a week, but bathing suits are not to be washed in washing machines and she knows that), so how do they have so much laundry?  I mean, seriously, I work out four days a week, and paint seven days a week in cloths I don’t wear outside the house, and yet, I have half the laundry those two do.  The only blessing is my oldest, my son does his own laundry so I no longer have that load hanging over my head.

Needless to say, Mondays are not my favorite day of the week.  I clean the house and do laundry because if I don’t do it on Mondays, it just doesn’t get done.  I don’t have a day off again until Friday and by then I am just too beat to do it.  So Mondays are not my favorite day.

But knowing that I get to sit down here for just a moment and share the pretties that I was able to knock out over the weekend, well that makes Monday just a little bit easier to take.  Knowing that I get to drink one more cup of coffee and type a few words makes today start on a positive note.

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First up in the land of pretty little cards to share is a fun little sketch challenge from the ‘clean team’ over at Freshly Made Sketches.  This week the clean team passed out a very simple sketch, which creates all kinds of fun possibilities.

Now Halloween is around the corner, and I am that mom that a couple days a week tucks a card into my kids’ lunch boxes.  Well this weekend my son complained that this year his halloween cards needed to be scarier…not little kid cute.  Frankly, I have never been more insulted.  When did he get so big that he didn’t like cute little cards…  Anyway, I decided this sketch was perfect for my son’s request.

I pulled out a Inkadinkado stamp pack and some black and white card stock.  I trimmed up the white card stock to look like the tag in the sketch and stamped out the blood drips and splatters with some carnation red Archival ink.  Then, I pulled out some Memento Luxe in wedding dress and stamped out the hands onto the black card stock.  I stamped out the sentiment and the spider from a Tim Holtz stamp pack onto the the tag portion, trying to keep it simple.  I added the tag to the black card stock with dimensional tape and left the card at just that.  I hope my son finds this card a bit more ‘scary’.

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The gurus of color over at Color Throwdown, this week have a bright fun color challenge this week.  They are looking for the colors medium blue, grassy green, coral, and hot pink.

I wanted to do something kind of simple here, so I pulled out an Ellen
Hutson Essentials stamp pack and pulled four different floral images out. I also pulled out some Distress Inks in peacock feather, mowed lawn, worn lipstick, and picked raspberry and stamped out the floral images as they fell down the page.  I pulled a sweet little sentiment from Inkadinkado and stamped it out with a blend of the four colors, and using a black pen, highlighted the words to pop them out.  I trimmed up the white card stock, and added some bright pink textured card stock under everything.  I messed up a bit and get a blob of color onto the corner of the white card stock, so I added some dew drops to mask my mistake.

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The gals over at Inspired by All the Little Things this week handed out a beautiful inspiration photo featuring a beautiful wood sign with fancy wording on it.

I wanted to really feature that wood paneling, but I didn’t want to do it
with an embossed feature.  So I pulled out a wood panel stamp from Bo Bunny, and on some burnt red textured card stock, stamped out the paneling with some Memento Luxe wedding dress ink.  I heat set the ink and then pulled out some dies to die cute some kraft paper.  I used both a Spellbinders wonky shaped die and some Ellen Hutson Essentials dies.  I stamped the wood paneling out again, this time in Archival tree branch onto the craft paper and a fun ‘fancy’ sentiment from Inkadinkado.  If you can’t read it, cause sometimes I take bad pictures, it says “Friends are like fat thighs, they stick together”.  I grabbed a green shade of copic and gave the leaves a bit of color, and muted pink copic to give the floral a bit of highlight.  I assembled everything and left at just that, wanting the simple to win out.

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The queens of color over at Colour Q this week passed out a very autumn themed color challenge this week.  They were looking for a CAS designs featuring early espresso, kraft, tangerine tango, tempting turquoise and white.

I fell in love with the wreath in the inspiration photo and knew I wanted to recreate it.  I pulled out an Avery Elle floral stamp pack and four shades of Memento Ink, including morocco, espresso truffle, desert sand, and teal zeal.  I stamped out florals till I built up the wreath till where I wanted it.  I added the sentiment using both the orange shade and the dark brown shade layered to add some flare to the words.  I trimmed the white card stock with some kraft and added a bright orange silk ribbon and a turquoise crystal to the paper stack.

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Finally today we have a bit of holiday cheer from the festive elves over at 52 Christmas Card Throwdown.  This week they are featuring a sketch challenge, and a simple one to bout.  I found this sketch to be more challenging than it should be.  I just kept over designing the card.

What I finally came up with I really liked.  I pulled out some white card stock and embossed it with a Darice embossing folder.  I then took out a My Favorite Things stamp pack/die combo and die cut the snow flakes onto the white card stock.  I pulled out some glitter paper in a pretty blue shade and added it under the die cuts and stamped out the snowflakes so they would show up in black ink.  Then using some different shades of blue ink I added some small snowflakes to the white card stock.  I added some dimensional tape under the white card stock so that it would hover over the glitter paper.  I added a pretty blue striped printed paper under the whole thing and stamped a Christmas sentiment to more glitter paper and adhered it.  Finally I added a bunch of clear crystals to the whole thing to give it just a bit more sparkle.  It took a while to get here, but in the end I really liked what I came up with.

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That’s it for my Monday morning break.  I am off to clean and fold laundry (yuck)…but I am grateful for the moment I am getting here.