Welcome, Baby!

For those of you who know my former teammate Melissa, you'll be excited to learn that she had a baby girl this afternoon! Well, Thursday afternoon might be better wording since many of you won't be reading this until Friday or later :-) Her daughter came on her due date (just like Maddie) which really isn't a surprise considering her son did as well! Melissa's husband is Nigerian and in keeping with his culture, there is a naming ceremony that will take place and that is when her name will officially be announced. I can tell you that she weighed in at 7 pounds, 14 ounces and that she and Mommy are doing well. Friday's Splitcoast Challenge was posted REALLY early which was nice. For the challenge, participants were asked to use white with any one color (neutrals were excluded). Since I wanted to make a card for Melissa, I decided to use Sweet Blush by Papertrey Ink. It's one of their new colors and I hadn't really had much of an opportunity to use it yet. I also had the coordinating ribbon I wanted to incorporate so I made my decision on the color almost immediately! If you take a look at the piece of cardstock that has the dots on it, you will see that I tried a technique called 'The Negative Effect' with my Cuttlebug. For this technique, you ink up the flat side of your embossing folder before you insert your cardstock and run it through the Cuttlebug. I used Sweet Blush ink of course since that was my only option :) and my Swiss Dots folder along with white cardstock to get the piece you see on the card. It's difficult to see, but the dots are still white (for the most part) while the rest of the cardstock has a blush tint to it. It's a neat little effect and just one more thing that little green machine can do! I used a little onesie image from a new set I picked out from the current mini catalog and I paper-pieced it using a scrap of Sweet Blush cardstock. I thought the onesie looked a bit plain so I added a little embellishment by punching out a little duck using a punch that I have on loan from Kate. It's funny--I would have never bought a duck punch, but now that I've had hers and I've used it on several occassions, I will have to buy one for myself! Funny how that works, isn't it? Maybe I'll find one this weekend at CKC in St. Louis!! Speaking of CKC, I doubt I'll have time to update so I'll be back on Sunday or Monday with a convention report for you. Have a great weekend and thank you for stopping by!