Red, White, and Jul (JB 13:2, US#104, and RS#47)

Hi all! I am loving on my Studio right now, and it is a mess! But, in all honesty, I don't care. It has felt SO good to reclaim my mojo lately! :) These 2 cards are for the following 3 challenges.... They are BOTH for Jingle Belles Scandinavian Christmas, here's the inspiration photo:

 And the card on the left is for Unscripted Sketches 194, and the "piggyback" challenge for that is to use stickers, here's the sketch:

and the card on the right is for Retrosketches #47, here is the sketch for that one:

Here's my 2 cards again:

I will start with the Unscripted sketches one, and as a side note my Chemistry Valentine from last week made the Top 3 over there! Yea! :)

That really made my day:) Ok, onto this week's card, I find it tough sometimes to make horizontally shaped cards, for some reason I tend to stick with vertical A2 sized cards... so I was glad to see that this one wasn't vertical! I pulled out these cute October Afternoon banners thinking they were stickers for the piggyback challenge, but they actually were just cute die-cuts instead. But the colors were too perfect, so I used them, and stitched the top like the package suggested. I LOVE this collection, and may need to order some of these papers, they are GORGEOUS!

I found a scrap of DP that I used on the bottom for the long banner with the sentiment. That's where my stickers came in, I used these gold letters from Dear Lizzy. For the horizontal element along the bottom of the sketch, my first inclination was to use a border sticker and gems, but none of the gems or borders I had laid just right together, and in the end I decided to stitch another line there and add some pretty buttons to the bottom instead.

The final touch was this wood snowflake that had such a great vintage appeal, I couldn't resist it. In the end, it really made the card, I think. :)

For the second card, I ended up using 5 elements instead of three. With them being these long skinny trees instead of round like the flowers on the sketch, I just felt it needed a bit more to give it a good flow. Generally speaking it's best to add odd numbers of elements like this, which is why I didn't stop at 4.

I used these KI memories Puffies tree stickers for the trees on top of the vertical element on this. I did something a bit out of the ordinary for me on this card, and that is I mixed different reds as well as used both white and cream colors.

For this one, I used the Cricut cartridge " Winter Woodland" to cut out the trees in the background from some Christmas paper scraps in my scrap bin. I used J*lly H*liday for the sentiment. the "J*lly" was stamped in Poppy Parade ink, and the snowflake was stamped in Cherry Cobbler ink.

I thought this embossing folder was very Scandinavian looking, it was one of the free ones I got with my new Big Shot for Christmas. :)

Well, that is all for me today! Hope you are doing great and having an amazing weekend. I am really excited because tonight some of my friends are having a belated birthday party for me! :) I am thrilled, since having a Christmas birthday is awesome, but parties just don't happen that often. So, I was really touched when Mary contacted me and said she would like to set this up. I am a really lucky girl when it comes to friends I have to say.... Just really blessed. :)

Have a fabulous weekend!

Hugs, Noelle