Post-World Cardmaking Day Weekend

Well, that was a busy & exciting weekend. I was part of a blog hop sponsored by the CardSwap Forum, which is a part of Cardmakermagazine.com. It was my first time to be one of the hops along a blog hop and it was so exciting to see new comments posted throughout the weekend. That is without a doubt the most comments I have ever had, and probably will ever have again until I am a hop along another blog hop in the future. And I enjoyed visiting all the other blogs on this hop as well as the hop along the Imagine-Nation Blog Hop.

I also submitted entries into several challenges (and I was actually the winner of one - yay me. Don't know what I won, but I won - lol). Here is a quick rundown of the challenge cards I made:

KISS - Monochrome (the one my number was drawn in):

 For my monochrome entry I went with green simply because I have tons of green paper - no clue how I managed to accumulate so much green since pink & purple are my favorite colors, but since I do have so much green it just screamed out "USE ME!". I also used a stamp set that my 15y.o. granddaughter won as a door prize at the LSS where we did a card class Make & Take Saturday. (Hope to post those cards tomorrow, maybe the next day)

Sketch.  

It is an A2 of course, since it will go in my OWH stack. The cardstock is a generic paper I bought at Michael's years ago. Same with the pink vellum. The solid green is from a DCWV stack:

Just a Note (had to be a 3x3 note card):

This was interesting because I had a hard time thinking in a 3x3 square. But here is my Just a Note:

Go Digi (use a digi provided by one of the three digi artists on the blog hop):

I went with the apples digi that was provided by Faith Skrdla (her blog) for my digi entry. And I had to redo them a couple of times - once because I over-saturated my cardstock & the red bled out, and it seems no amount of colorless blender will help when you bleed deep color. And another redo because I bought some of the new Copic paper while I was at the LSS Saturday and I had a slight learning curve figuring out how to get the blending I wanted.

Color Scheme (use purple, orange & brown):

It is a pretty simple card, and most of my required color was already done for me because it was printed paper that already had orange, purple and brown. But I was having a hard time thinking this one through and most of my orange was a bright orange, which I just wasn't feelin' that day.

10 Minute Card (set a timer & complete a card in 10 minutes or less):

Okay, I probably cheated on this one because I used a collection pack which has all the matching paper with stickers and adhesive letters (didn't use the letters though), so this one went together in less than 10 minutes. But I swear, if I had not used a collection pack it would take me an hour just to stage components because I pull out paper & stamps and embellishments and then I swap paper, then I swap paper again, then I swap embellishments, then I swap paper again, then I swap stamp, then I swap . . . well, you get the picture - lol. Anyway, here is my 10 minute entry that is now added to my OWH stack:

And a secret challenge that the blog hop co-ordinator posted on her blog and you had to find it to get details on what to create (a Christmas card with gold, but no ribbon:

And here is what I learned with this challenge.
(1) I don't own much gold! I have one package with some gold dots and I have Alcohol Ink in Gold, that's it! Adding that to my shopping list for next week :gold stuff".
(2) I cant use Alcohol Ink to stamp a rubber stamp and get the gold image on a piece of cardstock. It dries too fast and it was too hard to clean off of the rubber stamp when I failed.

I went with the alcohol ink and stamped on it with Memento Black Tuxedo which does not come out very black on the Gold Alcohol Ink, but the end result suited the stamp as well as the paper behind, so I think I like it better than if it had come out a clear sharp black image.

And here is a second shot of the Christmas card since the gold in the first is muted to a point that it looks almost like an aged brown:

There were other challenges posted that I just could not find the time to create a card for. Maybe I will do better managing my time next time.