As the final days of summer (or at least summer vacation) come to a close, I find myself a little sad.  Since we moved at the beginning of summer (literally, school ended on a Friday, and we were on the road driving across the country on Sunday), the family’s schedule has been practically non existence.  For the summer, we stopped all organized events, trying to adjust to our new life here in Virginia.  There has been something so freeing for all of us not being shackled to a clock.  But with school starting in just a few days, the freedom of lazy summer days lounging on the couch with my kids watching bad/great childhood movies are almost over.  And really for the first time in a long time, I find myself longing for just one more week with the little people.  One more week of wearing our pajamas all day long.

With the kids going back to school, that means I will have some more time to work on my projects (and you know clean the house and do the laundry), so expect some more fun things coming out of my world.  I have a couple of things planned that I hope excited those who regularly follow me, not to mention the continuation of my Halloween card series.

Today, I have just a few challenge cards to share with you.  Time has been limited so I wasn’t able to play with as many as I wanted too.

Up first is an AMAZING challenge from the gals over at The Paper Players.  They are having a clean and simple COLORING challenge.  I think at this point people know how I feel about coloring, so this one really excited me!!!

Frankly, the hardest part was choosing an image to color.  I finally settled on this fun swimmer from Art Impressions.  I 

stamped her out and colored her with my copic markers.  I kept the background really simple, just adding a pool and the concrete around it.  Hope you all find the daring little swimmer as great as I do.

Another really fun clean and simple card challenge this week was sponsored by the team over at Less Is More.  This week the theme is a little opened ended with the theme, “your perfect holiday”.  I went with the idea of what your perfect holiday or ‘vacation’ would be.  For me that is easy…it would just be something that included cocktails with fruit and umbrellas in it.

So I pulled out this Newton Nooks (retiring) stamp set and stamped out a bunch of fruity cocktails and colored them in with my copics.  I found a perfect sentiment from Your Next Stamp and added it under the images.  Yeah…this does look like the perfect holiday to me.

Finally, there is a fun color challenge from Art Impressions.  They are having an orange and purple color challenge, so I pulled out (obviously) an AI halloween stamp.

I stamped out this great couple and colored them in with my copics, pretending the frog suit was instead a Barney the dinosaur costume.  I got my purple too dark, and never really got the shadowing where I wanted it…but the couple ended up really cute despite it.

I am off to go meet new teachers with my kids before we enjoy our last weekend before school, but I hope your last days of summer are spent with people you love!