You Made My Day!

     This week's challenge on the SUO Challenges Blog has been one of my favorites. As soon as I started working on this project, I knew what mine was going to be. I just love the little, "You Made my Day!" stamp in this year's Stampin' Up! Stamp Set, Best of Greetings. 

     When we decided on this for a theme at SUO Challenges, I was equally sure that I would be in the mood for a fun Christmas greeting.  After all, Christmas is next month!  But now that the time is here, I find that I'm just a wee bit tired of Christmas because I'm working on two big projects that involve Christmas.  So, for a short time at least, I needed a break from Christmas.  So not only am I using a non-holiday greeting in my card, I'm not even close to using Christmas colors!  In no stretch of my imagination do I see Tangering Tango and Pear Pizzazz as Christmas colors! 

     I'm always in need of some kind of "Thank You" note.  I love the "You Made my Day" stamp because it's perfect for a card to send quickly to someone who has done something to make me smile.  I have a customer I hadn't heard from in a while call to chat and ask for information about current Stampin' Up! products.  Sharon made me smile and I had just the card to send her with some flyers I put in the mail that afternoon.  She made me smile and this stamp makes me smile just thinking about her calling!

     Flowers seem to go well with this kind of a happy Thank You note, too.  I made a quick scan of the stamp sets on my shelf and picked out the Stamp Set, Too Kind.  You know from another recent SUO Challenge post that my favorite technique is Two-Step Stampin, and Too Kind is a Two-Step Stamp Set – perfect.  Two "favorites" in one card!!  In this set, the two stems are part of one stamp.  I first stamped that on my Naturals Ivory cardstock.  Then I stamped the bottom layer of each flower with Tangerine Tango Classic Ink that I'd stamped off once on scratch paper – so it's lighter than the full Tangerine Tango ink that I used for the stamp that's the top layer of the flower images.

     And of course flowers need to be tied into a bouquet!  So I cut a piece of Pear Pizzazz 3/4" Chevron Ribbon to wrap around the card with the tie arranged just over the stems of the flowers.

     For the greeting, I first stamped it in Tangerine Tango (full strength!), then cut it with a small framelit from the Ovals Collection Framelits.  For the Pear Pizzazz cardstock mat, I traced around the outside of the same Framelit shape and cut it out by hand.  Then I adhered the stamped oval to the mat and adhered it to the card front with Stampin' Dimensionals that I placed on the top and bottom so that the oval element straddled the Chevron Ribbon.  Finally, I adhered all the layers – the stamped layer, then some Pear Pizzazz cardstock and a piece from the Designer Series Paper Set, Sweater Weather, before putting the whole card front onto a base card of Naturals Ivory.

     As I was getting ready to call the card, "Done," I decided there was just a bit too much white space in the upper right section of the card front. I tried a few different ideas, and finally settled on some Tangerine Tango Candy Dots.  And just for good measure, I added two Pear Pizzazz Candy Dots to accent the greeting.  Here's a little technique hint:  To get the Candy Dots just where you want them to make them even, as up in the right corner, I use a shape from a Paper-Piercing Pack and a sharp pencil to mark where I want the dots to go.  In this case, I used a square from the Essentials Paper-Piercing Pack.

     Now I could call it, "Done"!  And I think I got enough of the non-holiday stuff out of my system that I'm ready to go back to a bit more of the festive Stampin' Up! products!  Now that I've had a break, I'm sure I'll have fun with it!