+ 2 News Items /// - 11 Thermometer Notches

Two pieces of good news! Both have to do with Sami Stamps. First item: she has a New Release! It is called "A Little Love Struck". Check it out! I love her simple and elegant line drawn images.

And now for Sami Stamps item number two: TaDa  What an honor! I was selected as a guest designer by Sami at Sami Stamps! 

This has NEVER happened to me before! I casually popped over to her site to see if she had a new challenge and saw this card that I made using her digital image:

I make a lot of cards and I never mail them to anyone. I give them in bunches to friends and family for them to stick in the mail. I did have a hard time giving this one away because I really love how it turned out and I love the image. I like how her shoulders are all hunched up trying to brace herself from the cold. It has been so cold here in Iowa that I think we are all going to have to have our shoulders pried from our ears by the time spring arrives. (Spring WILL arrive - right?)  I really liked how the paper piecing turned out on this and love the background card stock. Well sissy Judy in Atlanta, GA ended up with this one. You know down there the temperature dips below forty and they cancel school, board up windows, stock pile fireplace logs, and buy entire grocery store inventories...Just to put it in perspective I was greeted this morning to a -11 degrees (yes....MINUS 11 degrees Fahrenheit, with an unmentionable wind chill factor!). Note to guys on the radio. When you announce the temperature is AGAIN minus ANYTHING please do NOT include the windchill factor...isn't MINUS anything bad enough!? SERIOUSLY - I do not want to start my day hearing that the windchill factor is negative 32 degrees!

Anyway...back to the awesome honor of being a guest designer.... Sami sent me this adorable little guy and I got to work straight away! Again I paper pieced...what is there about snipping teeny tiny pieces of paper? Is it a throwback to playing with paper dolls? Is it the immediate satisfaction of snip-snip-trim-trim? Is it because I am too lazy to color the entire image? Is the thinking that is required to decide where to cut - what to leave - and what order the layers need to be glued into place? I don't know but I really like paper piecing. It does make it necessary to have just the right design papers with teeny tiny prints. I hope Sami likes what I did with her little guy!

Down side to paper piecing? The pieces are small...really really small! I printed and cut his shirt. Stepped away to put in a load of laundry. Came back to the craft table. Could NOT for the life of me or St. Anthony find that wee striped shirt. Determined he would have a striped shirt I returned to the Fiber Bubble tonight to reprint and re-cut his diminutive t-shirt. I did and as soon as I finished cutting t-shirt part two I reached for the Copics and POOF out of nowhere the first tiny garment floated to the table top. (I think it was stuck to the bottom of the Copic crate). (I blame the laundry.) Well, a quick thank you to St. Anthony, and I now have an extra, long sleeve tiny-T for a second card.

Sami's Friend Part One (watch for another friend of Sami's when I use the duplicate tiny shirt I cut out)
~Base card red cardstock
~Layer of BasicGrey Oliver Paper Pad
~Strip of blue from same BasicGrey collection
~Layer of dry wall mesh (I have enough of this stuff that I could use it on every card I make for the next 15 years and STILL have enough to put up a 12' x 12' wall!)
~Spellbinders/Cuttlebug embossed oval - edges distressed with Ranger Blending Foam and Tim Holtz Fired Brick Distress Ink
~Image by Sami Stamps colored with Copics and paper pieced using My Mind's Eye Lost & Found II (striped shirt) and BasicGrey Oliver Paper Pad collection (balloons)
~Sentiment is by Taylored Expressions from Wreath of Love stamp set
~Dots of Stampin Up Crystal Effects on balloons
Challenges/Inspirations
Tuesday Morning - sketch
Little Red Wagon - love
Cuttlebug Mania - a touch of red
Flourishes - love and red
Love to Scrap - use word love
Cute Card Thursday - lots of love
Digi Stamps 4 Joy - heart

Just in case you don't believe how stinkin' cute and small his shirt is.... here is the found (thank you St. Anthony) spare shirt....

Lost, found, and tiny shirts,
Nancy in Iowa