A Go-to Sketches Blog Hop!

You know it's a good week when it involves not just one giant blog hop, but two. Good times, good times. Today we're using a little sketch of mine that, here at Paper Crafts, we affectionately refer to as Sketch #65.

And I guess I'm still in the Stretch-the-Sketch mood from yesterday, cause that's what I did. I flipped this one 90 degrees to the right and went at it that way.

A few notes about this one. First off, I used several items from Little Yellow Bicycle's new Fresh Print Clothesline. This line features a lot of yellow, therefore, I love it. Of course. One of the items is a pre-fab tag... now that is a time-saver, my friends. I took it apart and reconfigured it a bit to make it work for where I was going with this, and I'm totally diggin' it. I also added the buttons to really push it along in that vintage-feel. I used my favorite stamp as of late (the doily image is from SEI's Juliette line) to give the feel of having the larger layer in the background without the weight of another layer. {Back to my old self there... avoiding layers. It's good to be home.} And then I decided, what the heck, here I am at this little 3 foot square card table {which is spectacularly bowed in the middle which provides the perfect surface for cutting non-straight lines on your cutter and stamping extremely wonky images with your stamps, so if you're into that kind of thing, call me. Have I got the table for you.} surrounded in my psudo dining room/workspace/current storage space of all junk from everywhere and I thought, hey, you know what would be perfect here? Stitching. Cause pulling a sewing machine out in the middle of all this mess is the most brilliant idea I've had all week. Sigh. But I couldn't let it go. So I pulled it out and set it at the very end of a very low sideboard and then proceeded to lean down to see the card and yet still stitch while I was actually standing. This was like some sort of nightmarish Craft Olympics where you are put through crafting obstacles such as making your own adhesive out of honey and cornstarch and fussy cutting patterned paper using just a nail clipper. Note the lovely imperfections. I was really going for that homespun feel {if you were with me in person, you would be able to hear the sarcasm, I promise}. I hear it's the imperfections that will make it worth millions one day. But since that day is likely far, far away, I went tried to cover some of them with some extra wide stitching. Whew. Good thing I actually like how it turned out. There are 10 others who took on the challenge as well. While they did not participate in the 1st Annual Olypics of Crafting, they did make what I'm sure are gold medal worthy projects based on Sketch #65. Check 'em out... Betsy Veldman Heidi Van Laar Kim Hughes Kim Kesti Latisha Yoast Maile Belles Maren Benedict Rae Barthel Teri Anderson And, since in every Olympics blog hop there must be a prize, no need to fear. Cath over at Moxie Fab World is heading up this hop and giving out 12 chances to win. Win what, you say? Well, 2 copies of Go-to Sketches, for starters. Why 2, you ask? One for you and one for you to hand off to a friend. A very good friend. And this... The brand new Distrezz-it-All by Donna Salazar and Zutter! Sweet. And since the Distrezz-it-All is one of our prizes, Donna has joined with us to create a Sketch #65 project, so be sure to visit her right here. So, for all 12 chances to win, just comment on the 12 blogs linked above.

I hear there's also a prize over at Paper Crafts Connection today... a Doodlebug card kit from what I hear. And so wraps up our first ever Go-to Sketches week, in honor of our first ever Go-to Sketches. Whew. What a week! I loved working on Go-to Sketches so this week has just been a big ol' ball of wonderfulness to me. I hope you guys love it as much as we do. Thanks, friends.