well, kind of… my blog is moving to a new place. You can find it here:

http://aqyera.blogspot.com/

I hope you’ll come and visit me at my new home. I’ll have a blog candy for you starting tomorrow January 10. Come and check out our Paper Sundae blog hop too - there are LOTS of prizes/blog candy to win.

This Sunday , Paper Sundaes is having a blog hop to kick off our new challenge blog!  There will be lots of prizes along the way, so I hope you come and join in the fun! I will also officially move my blog to a new home on that date, so come and check it out.

We hope that you’ll be able to join us on Sunday the 10th, and that we’ll see you back again on the 17th for our first Challenge! Can’t wait!

Today’s challenge on Ildi Co’s Creative Challenges is Scrap & Metal. When I first read the title/description of the challenge I imagined something tough and masculine, but then I thought - metal doesn’t have to be tough… and look what I came up with - a baby card.
I used Ildi Co’s Cuddles Kuma Plushie image, cut of the Christmas tag and colored him with Prisma pencils. For scraps I used scraps from BG Bittersweet paper. Metal is represented by Silver circle clip, silver dew drops - I also used silver ribbon and all the pieces are outlined with silver marker.

My new Flourishes stamps arrived just in time to put them under the Christmas tree. I couldn’t wait to ink them up and create with them For this card I stamped the Waterlily on a watercolor paper and colored it with SU markers and aquapainter. The middle part of the flower is popped up (hard to see). The Cardstock is Rich Razzleberry and DP is Cottage wall from SU.

Second picture is a detail from the inside of the card. Sentiment is stamped with really light purple Memento ink.

This is my first card made with Sweet Pea mermaid stamp. Aren’t they beautiful? and so much fun to color. This one is called Dragonfly Fantasy.

The image is colored with Prismacolor pencils. Cardstock is Old Olive & Bermuda Bay, DP is from Dovecraft and the ribbon from my Secret Sister Shana. I kept the layout simple to keep the focus on the mermaid. You’ll be seeing more of them here -  that’s for sure.

Yay! I got my first blog award today!! I received this Kreativ Blogger award from my online friend Jenny. Her blog is always full of great ideas and  cool projects. Thanks a lot Jenny!

Here is what you need to do when you receive this award:

1. thank the person who nominated you.
2. copy the logo and place it on your blog.
3. Link to the person who nominated you for this award.
4. name 7 things abut yourself that people might find interesting
5. nominate 7 kreativ bloggers
6. post links to the 7 blogs you nominate
7. leave a comment on each of the blogs, letting them know they have been nominated

So here are my nominees: Shanna, Danielle, Blankiefinder, Lenocka, Joanne, Vicki, Sara

now the 7 interesting things - hmm, this is the hardest part:

1. My favorite colors are turquoise and teal
2. I have an unbelievable sweet tooth - especially for cookies and pastries - that’s why I learned to bake
3. I have to split my craft time between 2 hobbies - cardmaking/papercrafting and cross-stitching and it’s hard (need more time)
4. I love to read, but don’t give me anything hard - I prefer historical and adventure/treasure hunting fiction
5. I love opera and ballet, I even worked at the opera, but I’m tone deaf and can’t sing anything more complicated then Jingle Bells
6. I’m still a kid at heart - love fairies, mermaids and animated kids movies that I watch with my kids
7. I’m an introvert who secretly wishes to be an extrovert

Mark this Saturday - November 7 in your calendars - it’s a day for  the Joint Blog Hop of Ildi Co,  Sunshine Stamps and the Stamping Boutique. Get ready for lots of fun - new winter releases, great ideas and some specials too! Just in time to beat the Holiday rush!

Have you seen the new line of stamps from The Pixie Cottage ? They are unbelievable cute. You can’t buy them yet, but you can preorder them at Michelle’s Scrapbooking. The Pixie Cottage is looking for design team members so I decided to apply. Here are 3 cards I picked as samples of my work.

The first one is card with Bryony from Faerie Song Art Stamps. I picked this one because it’s a cute little pixie, like some of those from The Pixie Cottage.

The second card features a Tilda with Broomstick from Magnolia - I played with a background a bit and it came out pretty good (in my humble opinion )

And for the last one I picked something different  - Village Christmas from Thomas Kinkade (Cornish Heritage Farms) just to show that I can work with a variety of images. Hope you’ll like them.

I finally gathered enough courage and decided to try and color some Kinkade images. Both images are from CHF Village Christmas stamp (snagged from Kristina on SCS). On the first one I tried to follow the colors from the original Kinkade painting. I used my Prisma pencils and OMS. I have more than a 100 pencils but I still had trouble finding the right shade.. so I mixed different colors on top of each other. I used BG Wassail DP for layering and gold CS for card base. Sentiment is from Inkadinkado.

And this is how the Christmas Village looks when all the light are off - maybe early morning?  For this card I used only shades of purple and grey and white carrara marble glitter on the snow. I didn’t want to draw attention away from the image so I just decorated the card with soft sheer white ribbon from Flourishes.

Flourishes are releasing new sets this Friday and with it comes a release challenge and release party - I love these - lots of fun and a chance to win!
The release challenge was to create a His & Hers cards - use the same stamp set or layout and make two cards. I actually did 2 sets of cards - I didn’t like the first too much - well, the cards were not bad, but it was hard to tell which one is feminine and which masculine so I tried again - this time with these baby booties.

I love the booties image - it’s so versatile, you could make them any color and it would still look great (I also made a cards with green booties, but not for this challenge). So I used the same image and layout, just did one in blue and one in pink. And I also used a bigger ribbon with a bow on the girly one to make it look more feminine and just ties a knot on a the boy card. The images are colored with prismacolor pencils and blended with OMS.