On counting your chickens and some exciting news

Happy Sunday to all of you! I had some really exciting news this weekend, which you may be aware of if you follow me on the InvisiblePinkFacebook. I have been invited to join the Design Team over at Holly Jolly Christmas Challenge!! It's a bi-weekly Christmas Card challenge that runs all year to help you stay inspired to build up a stash of Christmas cards. I am so excited to join the talented ladies on the DT and happy this will ensure I will have built up a good stash of Christmas cards in good time, so that I can focus on stressing about other things close to Christmas instead, hehe. Actually this year I'm most likely going back home for Christmas, as a very dear friend will have his PhD dissertation on the Friday before Christmas, and I can't wait to join him for his dissertation, and should things go well - for the gigantic party afterwards!! So it's even more imperative that I get my Christmas stuff organised in good time. My first contribution to the Holly Jolly challenge will be on September 30th, but there will be a new challenge on the upcoming Tuesday so if you want some inspiration for creating Christmas cards, hop over there on Tuesday.

On another note, I have updated the Challenge page here. I wanted to create a list of some of the challenges I love to turn to for inspiration. I prefer challenges which let you use any crafting products so I have left out several challenges I participate in from time to time as they require you to use supplies from a certain company only.

Now on to today's card. The challenge over at Shopping Our Stash this week is Chicken. What a great challenge, I was thrilled as the challenge gave me a great excuse to use the cute little chickie from the Paper Smooches Chubby Chums set. I made another card earlier in the year, you can see it here. I used the sketch from Freshly Made Sketches as an inspiration. I assume "Any shape" on the sketch includes a pyramid of chicks... I am also submitting my card to CASology, where the Cue Card is three. Last but not least I'm also submitting to Addicted to Stamps and more where the theme is Make Your Mark as I coloured the chickees with Copics.

I stamped the chick twice on scrap paper and cut her out to make a mask and then stamped the pyramid using the masks. I coloured the chickees with my Copic markers which I have been hoarding, but not using nearly as much as I had planned. For the matting I used some orange paper from my stash which has been hanging around forever. Finally, the adhesive gems are also from my stash as I bought a big set of Papermania gems in all the colours of the rainbow and love to have a chance to use them.

Card: Leonardo Stationery 350 gsm Smooth white card, Hobbycraft 160 gsm white card, orange card from my stash (no idea of make)
Stamps: Paper Smooches Chubby Chums
Ink: Tsukineko Memento Tuxedo Black, Copics Y13, Y15, Y19, R20, R24, R43
Other: Papermania adhesive gems Capsule Sunshine