Job lot....3 Cards lots of challenges!

I have had fun today - after a bit of a lazy start have flittered away the hours catching up with birthday cards I need to make for my family.  I have a large family and having been busy finishing my degree studies had got a  bit behind...but I've made some progress today and managed to fit them into challenges too....

This one is for my niece Jessicas' Birthday...guess what, she's 21 and she's a real pink loving girly girl! I used 'Damask' stamp from Penny Black which is one of favs at the moment for backgrounds, combined it with some pretty girly papers from my stash and added some dewdrops - oh and I used my new Tim Holtz Sizzix 'elegant flourishes' die for the first time - it's a dream and going to be used a lot I can tell!!

I'm entering this into the Penny Black Saturday 'swirl' challenge ; Totally Gorjuss sketch challenge ; Quirky Crafts 'Girly Girl' and Craftalicious No 1 Challenge where the theme is 'New' (I thought using my new dies counted and also as Jessica is 21 she's entering a new grown up stage in her life!).

Next came a card for Jess' older sister Becky, who's a bit of a Forever Friends fan...she's busy planning her wedding  at the moment and I've just finished helping her with her invites...(cutting out 60 fantasy film butterflies seemed like a good idea at the time). I used Judikins stamp ' Arabesque background' with distress inks and water for the background paper, and Hero Arts Cling dots for the strip.  I painted the image with distress inks - oh and the image is actually two separate stamps which I masked to create this cute group.

I stamped the bear with the balloon first, then stamped again on some eclipse masking paper which I cut out and used to cover my original stamping, then stamped the two other bears so they appear slightly behind (using my stamp positioner to get them just where I wanted).

This card is going into the Paper Take Weekly Challenge which was a sketch with the optional theme of Lilac and Lemon - mine's more like purple with a blob of bright yellow, but still I tried, good job it's optional !! I'm also linking it to the One stop Craft Challenge who's theme is to make your own desinger paper.

And finally this is a 2nd birthday card for my great nephew  - gosh that makes me feel old!! He wouldn't appreciate flowers and ribbons and all the things I usually love to throw on so I've kept it simple...it's actually a money/voucher envelope and has a little car inside it too..I'm sending this on it's way to Stampin for the Weekend for their summer/travel theme challenge.