Sweet Stampin' ~ Stars & Stripes

Our latest challenge at Sweet Stampin' is live and we're wanting to see your creations that have 'Stars & Stripes' on them! Yes, you can interpret that in the traditional way, and make a patriotic creation or you can choose an 'outside the box' choice like I did. I created this card for our neighbour's youngest son for his birthday. He happens to share my birthday, so every year, I create a special card for him and run it across the driveway in the morning. Our two families have become very close as we live so near each other. We literally can wave at each other from our kitchen windows!

It's been such a busy couple of weeks, filled with highs and lows. Last week was all about getting my baby boy through some minor surgery and he was such a trouper! This week I played catch up for all I missed while nursing my lil' lad. Yesterday was an incredibly busy day, starting with an extra breakfast guest as a baby brother was being born! It was a heartwarmingly joyful day! I then spent the morning with my baby sis and followed this with lunch with two of our oldest friends who live in the Wellington area where we used to live before moving to London. Strange coming back from London to a completely different city, but it's where the rest of my family lives and after 13 years in London, we wanted our kiddos to know their extended family, so Auckland it was. It's been so wonderful being home and around them all. It's been a bonus to have such a lovely family to live next door to also and they hail from Scotland and England, so you can imagine our joy having lived in the UK for so many years, to have lovely British neighbours!

I used a really cool My Mind's Eye paper pad from their Lost and Found 2 collection called Breeze. The vintage train is part of the page design and inspired me to pull out some fabulous Lili of the Valley stamps with an equally vintage feel to create this card. I opted to stamp them on little tags and add them over a fabulous embossing folder design with lots of uplifting words. I used an opaque vellum for this and I love the effect the embossing has on it. I must remember to do this again! It needed a darker layer behind so the words could be easily read, as the paper was too pale, so I cut some kraft card and trimmed it with a scalloped border for a bit of extra detail. Then wrapped the panel in heavy twine, and added a large rusty star from Live & Love Crafts (I'm still crying in my coffee that Sandy closed the store!)

How fab are these Lili of the Valley vintage stamps?! I just love them for this type of Vintage-feel creation. They're from an older grunge set of stamps, which I can no longer find in the store (oh no!) so I hope you snapped some up before they were gone! Remember you need to do some stamping on your creations to enter our challenges. We all so love seeing what you come up with, so I hope you'll come enter this challenge and show us your 'Stars & Stripes' creations. I'm off to make dinner and spend some time with my babbies. Catch ya'll again soon. Hugs, Wends xoxo

Challenge Entries:

4 Crafty Chicks: #357 ~ Anything Goes

Cute Card Thursday: #484 ~ Anything Goes

Deep Ocean Challenge: #158 ~ Lots of Layers

Crafty Catz Challenge: #377 ~ Anything Goes

Colour Crazy Challenge: #26 ~ Anything Goes

Lil' Patch of Crafty Friends: #61 ~ Anything Goes

Simon Says Wednesday Challenge: Anything Goes

Crafty Creations Challenges: #344 ~ Anything Goes

Crafty Gals Corner Challenge: #129 ~ Anything Goes

Creative Inspirations Challenge: #278 ~ Dots and/or Stripes