2012 Artisan Finalists Blog Hop - Day 1

Welcome to my first post for the Artisan Finalists Blog Hop! Every year Stampin' Up! hosts their "Artisan" contest for demonstrators based on creativity and workmanship. This year they selected twenty finalists from those entries and from those twenty, ten were selected to be part of the new Artisan Design Team. While we are not the ones who were selected for the design team, we still thought it would be fun to give you a closer look at our projects. Each day for the next ten days, we will post pictures of our projects and more details on how they were created. Each entry had five cards, three scrapbook pages, and two 3-dimensional items, so no matter what your interests are, there should be something for everyone.

I struggled a bit on what order to post my creations, but decided to show them to you in the order they were created. This card was the first I made for my contest entry. Most of the time I make simple cards, I like to think this is one of them. Some of my other Artisan cards got a little crazy, but I liked how this one turned out even though it was simple. I used my favorite set - Elements of Style and some of my favorite colors, Very Vanilla, Pool Party and Soft Suede. I embossed the Pool Party strip with the Stripes embossing folder, then punched out the Soft Suede three times with the Curly Label punch, then embossed them with the Perfect Polka Dots embossing folder. I folded them over the embossed Pool Party strip to look like little pockets and added brads to hold them down.

Then I heat embossed the large swirly stamp from Elements of Style with white on a Soft Suede strip and adhered it above my "pockets". Then added a scallop punched border above it in Pool Party. I stamped the large swirl again in Soft Suede ink at the top and add some bitty flower punches layered with small circles, then finished them off with a small pearl. I added a "Thank You" stamped label (inked around the edges) and a strip of Pool Party ribbon at the bottom.

That's it for my "Day 1" project! If you just came here from Connie Collins' blog, wasn't her card to die for? That shape and the red with the black...LOVE IT! OK, now on with the blog hop for you - next you'll visit Melissa Stout who has an absolutely gorgeous scrapbook page to show you! The complete list of hoppers is here (all except for Mary Haugen who couldn't join us this time):

1. Connie Collins
2. Holly VanDyne (you are here!)
3. Melissa Stout
4. Amy O'Neill
5. Sandie Connor
6. Amy Rogers
7. Mercedes Weber
8. Tara (Murphy) Bourgoin
9. Mindy Bingamon

Be sure to stop back by tomorrow for our next Artisan Finalist projects! :) (And I'll have an MDS blog post for you in the morning as well!)