I was itching to make a card tonight with the beautiful new Chelsea Gardens paper collection from Close To My Heart. The picture over at Inspired By... made me think of these papers and I wanted to try the shadowed sentiments technique from Make It Monday. I am also linking up to the Heart2Heart "winter blues" challenge.

I cut the 'you' die out several times and glued them all together to make it stand out more and decided to do second generation stamping with Charcoal to achieve my shadowed sentiment.

I was quite interested in playing along with the "sentiment windows" challenge over at Make It Monday and took out my new Papertrey Ink dies to create some cute cards. Since the Simon Says Stamp Wednesday Challenge is to add to your Christmas stash I set to work. The BeYOUtiful challenge over at Heart2Heart to use something you think is beautiful led me to incorporate last year's beautiful Close To My Heart Oh Deer! papers. I just love the tree inspired papers, especially at this time of year as I look out my craft room window and see our gorgeous Poplar trees. I have to thank my Auntie Karen for the cute stitched snowflake die cuts she sent me that ended up being the perfect embellishments for these cards!

I was very excited to try out this week's Make It Monday technique of creating faux epoxy embellishments. I loved the design of the sample and chose to incorporate some plaid into mine. It proved to take a lot of time to make 3 cards using this technique but I am pretty pleased with the outcome!

Do you ever have a vision of what you want a card to look like but you just can't make it happen on paper? Well that definitely happened to me this week! I played and played with this idea and am finally happy with the result! I wanted to play along with Papertrey Ink's Make It Monday challenge for the first time and was excited to pull out this set I've had for a few years to play along with the "small images on repeat" challenge this week. I am also linking up with the "stamp it" challenge over at Simon Says Stamp Wednesday Challenge.