It's time for the Papertrey Ink monthly blog hop. How did it get to be the 25th already? I must admit, however, March is one of my least favorite months. I'm so ready for Spring by now, and we are once again buried under in several inches of new snow. Once April comes, I always feel like Spring has a chance!

This month's challenge was to use embroidery floss in a creative way. I decided to make some small tassels to attach to some pennant flags. I used the Pearl Cotton floss which is a little heavier, but can be found right along side the regular floss at Michaels. To create the tassels,  I used a tutorial I found here. It was very easy to follow.

This turned out to be a very difficult card to photograph so the embossing would show.  I used the partial embossing technique again which I'm liking a lot, and scored two lines at the bottom of the embossed portion of the card. The pennants and banner die for the sentiment are from the Spellbinder's Nested Pennant set. The banner line is cut from Quickutz Pennants set, and the embossed portion of the card was made with Papertrey's Tintype Impression plate. I used Papertrey's Royal Velvet cardstock and two designs from their Pacific Vineyard pad of papers. The sentiment is from the Papertrey "Round & Round" set. Finally, the pears are my faves: A Muse Creative Candy.

This is the first time I've participated in a Just Rite challenge although I've long been a fan of their stamps. This challenge comes at a perfect time since I depleted the entire stash of thank you notes on Monday after writing all the friends who have helped us out since my surgery.

I combined two Just Rite sets for the focal point: the square frame come from the "Hope" set which I then cut and embossed with a Nestabilities Label One die (Spellbinders). The circle and border come from "Just a Note" which I cut with a Nestabilities Circle die. The bow is made from my favorite ribbon from The Paper Source. It's two-sided satin which makes it so much easier to tie. The tiny pearls (which match more accurately IRL) are A Muse Creative Candy and the two stick pins came from a Scrapbook Circle kit. The beautiful papers are more My Mind's Eye; this time from the Hattie paper pad. The card base is Aqua Mist from Papertrey.

While I was recuperating, I spent a lot of time surfing the internet and got the urge to participate in some of the MANY challenges on the internet for card makers. The Clean & Simple sketches have always been a favorite of mine. Here's last week's sketch:

And here's my take on it:

I started with Papertrey Ink's White Select cardstock and die (Papertrey) cut three flowers with Raspberry Fizz, Orange Zest, and Hawaiian Shores felt. The rickrack, ribbon, and buttons were all items from my stash. The patterned paper is from the Emma's Shoppe 6X6 pad by Crate Paper. The sentiment is from Floral Frenzy (Papertrey). I haven't used this set in a while. The inside sentiment reads "You're in my thoughts today." I have a friend who had a hip replacement this morning, so this will be on the way to her as soon as we know where she'll be for rehab.

I've been following the CASE Study challenge for several months, but finally created a card for the current challenge. Each week they provide a card as inspiration. As soon as I saw these delightful card with sailboats, I knew I wanted to play along.

I just ordered this sailboat/sentiment stamp by Unity and it came last week. I knew it would be perfect for this challenge.

Cardstock: from my stash; Patterned paper: "Mabel" by Stella Rose (My Minds Eye) & Celebrate (Teresa Collins); Stamps: Celebrate Webster's Pages (Unity); Twine: The Twinery.  I colored the sailboat with Faber Castell Stampers Big Markers. Although it's hard to see each star in the sentiment has a tiny pearl I colored with a B37 Copic marker.

Although I had the card made for last week's Make It Monday in time to post last night, I didn't get it photographed. I guess you can blame March Madness. The Syracuse game was only seen here on digital TV so I had to watch it downstairs. They lost in a rather sad game with nearly 18 turn-overs.

The challenge last week was to emboss just a part of your card. I used the Woodgrain Impression Plate by Papertrey Ink and embossed only the right hand side of the card. I'm also linking this to Creative Every Day where the theme for March is "nest."

I used new papers from 7 Gypsies Conservatory 6X6 paper pad, stamps from Cavallini and Papertrey Ink with a bit of distressing and distress inks from both Tim Holtz and Papertrey. The cardstock is Ocean Tides by Papertrey.

I got to this week's Papertrey Ink challenge a bit earlier this week. The challenge was to do some distressing on the project. It's not something I do often. In fact, I have a distressing tool which I used for the first time today! I must say it worked very well, although the distressing around all the edges of the patterned papers doesn't show up particularly well here.  I also took the opportunity to use one of my new stamp sets: Mat Stack #2 Collection. It's filled with very elegant designs for the mat stack and a good addition to my stamp collection.

Quite some time ago, I dyed a lot of seam binding with a variety of mists. I chose the colors for the card based on a piece of the ribbon. I used another piece of the My Mind's Eye paper from the Mabel collection and one from Basic Grey's Basic Kraft collection.

I love the sketches at Clean & Simple, but haven’t had a lot of time to play along for a while. This week’s sketch is a busy cardmaker’s dream. One piece of cardstock, one sheet of patterned paper from a 6 X 6 paper pad (I used both sides of it), a piece of ribbon, two buttons, one Fillable Frame stamp, and two sentiments (one inside and one out). It was finished in about 10 minutes. I love this color combination, too.

Cardstock: Dark Chocolate (PTI), Patterned Paper: "Mabel" Stella & Rose (My Mind's Eye); Die: Fillable Frame #8 (PTI); Stamps: Fillable Frames #8 & #5; Buttons: LaDiDah (KI Memories)