Challenge Time Again!!!

Let me start by saying a belated Merry Christmas to you all, as I haven't been blogging much over the last month.  I haven't been creating much over the last month apart from some Christmas cards and not wanting to post those here until at least they got into the mail (some are still waiting on a stamp - yes I am that slack with Christmas cards!!!  To get back into the swing of creativity I took some inspiration from a couple of challenges from a some of my favourite challenge sites.

This first one is a double challenge.  Firstly I took inspiration from Mojo Monday Sketch Blog - Challenge 171, it was a round or square challenge and I chose square, then couldn't locate my square punch so took some licence and did scallop squares instead!  The second challenge to inspire me was the Colour Lab Challenge #22 over at My Create Ink, although I didn't use all the blues in their challenge.  My Create Ink have the best colour matching tool, really good to use if you are stuck for which colours to put together.  I used one of the level 1 hostess sets on this card, Silhouette Sentiments, and decided to use the stamp name as inspiration to try my first attempt at silhouette stamping, I was pleased with the result as it gives just a little definition to the flowers.  The sentiment is from Well Scripted, I just love stamps that include two fonts in the sentiment!

This next one was the card I created based on the Saturday Sketch Challenge over at Stamping 411. Again this one was a blue based card but not the same colours as in the Colour Lab challenge, this one I used some of the DSP from the colour collections and tried out my new stamp out of the Heard from the Heart set that I got as part of December Frenzy.  The  cute little gift bag is from the level 1 hostess set Birthday Bakery, and I used Crystal Effects to give some gloss to the heart on the bag and on the three punch out hearts at the top.  Crystal effects really brings the underlying colour to life, and with just a sprinkle of Dazzling Diamonds glitter, adds some subtle bling to a card. 

I hope you have enjoyed looking at these two cards, and come back and visit again.  I will hopefully be posting a little more regularly now the life is returning to "normal" whatever that is lol.