I am such a happy girl today.  I needed a hoodie to walk the kids to school.  It was amazing.  Needless to say all the kids were complaining about being ‘cold’, but we will simply ignore them for the fools they are.  Yeah Fall is sort of officially here.

One of the problems with living in Southern California is that you frankly can wear shorts year round (and trust me, my husband does).  This fact drives me insane.  I like layers.  I always have.  Give me a good sweater with a blazer and a scarf.  Tank tops and shorts just don’t do it for me. (please note come spring I will be celebrating the sun).  I am needless to say a four seasons girl and living here just doesn’t fulfill my silly personal needs.

However this morning things were cool, and I loved it.  So here I sit with a blanket draped over my lap, some hot apple cider steaming next to me, and the promise of cooler weather on the horizon.   I am as content as can be.  And I may just keep this position till it is time to get the small people from school.

Up first in the card challenges for today is a fun theme challenge from the group Less is More.  They are looking for a CAS one layer card with the theme of ‘Dreams’.

Needless to say I started down the snarky route, as I tend to do, using a stamp talking
about never getting enough sleep, but at the last minute I re-found this stamp set from Stampendous talking about homes, love and dreams.  Now we have a move coming up in the upcoming months and my middle child is not handling that knowledge all that well, so I figured this might just be the most perfect card for her to maybe brighten her spirits.  I stamped out the house and masked it with some post-it tape.  Then using Distress ink I blended in tumbled glass, broken china, mermaid lagoon, wilted violet and worn lipstick around the image.  I flicked water onto the card, and stamped the sentiment.  I really struggle with this concept of CAS one layer, but I think i came pretty close to something decent.

The gals over at The Paper Players this week have a great color challenge that got me all kinds of Halloween crafting excited.  This week they are looking for the colors pumpkin pie, basic black and wild wasabi.

I pulled out a Stampendous Halloween stamp set and started building a scene with all those great characters.  I am a big fan of huge scenes with limited color pallets, so this one really made me excited.  I went nuts coloring in the spooky gang, sticking to the colors in the challenge with my copics (everyone is just going to have to deal with the skin tones and the bits of grey, cause grey is black right?).  I tried to put in an interesting ground, but I think I came up a little short.  The sky needed some flare, so I pulled out an Inkadinkadoo stamp and put in some repeating tree branches.  Finally I pulled a Tim Holtz by Sizzix die and die cut the sentiment out of both orange and black card stock.  I adhered the letters to the card and left it that simple.

The design team over at Always Playing with Paper‘s The Challenge this week passed out a sweet color challenge.  They were searching for designs with the colors turquoise, red, gold and white.

Now, I am not a paper-piecer.  There are people who are brilliant at taking a collection of paper and layering them together till they get a small piece of art, I am just not one of them.  No, I am a color.  I like building my layers with color, not sheets of paper.  However, for reasons even I don’t understand, with this challenge I went searching for my inner paper-piecer.  And yes, it was a mistake, but one I learned a lot from.  I die cut two tags, each out of a piece of textured card stock, one in red the other turquoise from a Sizzix die.  Then, using some Little B floral dies, I die cut flowers and leaves out of some velum with gold diagonals cut through it.  I added a gold brad to the tags and added some dimensional tape under them so that it popped a little from the card frame.  I then adhered the flowers and leaves with create gluing so you wouldn’t see it through the velum sections.  Finally I took a bit of gold lacy washi tape and added it to the side of the card.

Finally today we have a great inspiration challenge from the team over at Muse.  The card to the left was the inspiration card for use to muse off of.  I loved how the floral images were rapped around the top half of the card.

I pulled out a layering stamp set from Hero Arts and started to layer the stamp with Distress Ink.  I tried to imitate the color pattern of the muse card.  I added the leaves to the card again keeping the spirit of the inspiration card.  I added some colored dots with my stylist to add a bit more of a spark.  Finally I pulled out a large sentiment from Fiskars and stamped it in Archival leaf green ink, and added another sentiment from Technique Tuesday in black.  I know I don’t normally do a lot of floral cards, but I am loving this one.

That is it for today.  I am going to now snuggle with my dog and my cider and enjoy the five minutes of cool weather we get to enjoy.  Till next time, I hope you too are getting a fall worth flipping for.