I am so excited to share with you this month’s project with for our Fancy Friday monthly hop!  If you just came over from the amazing Jeanna, welcome to the next stop.  My friends and I want to be able to share with you our ideas in a monthly format.  We will use different themes each month – sometimes colors, sometimes a sketch, sometimes a stamp set focus.  The one thing you can count on is that it will be fancy!  Over our year on the 2013 Artisan Design Team,  “fancy” became our word to describe the best projects, the best new clothes, even the best pedicure colors.  Now we want to share with you our take on “fancy” each month.  This month our theme is “Fancy Flashback”!  We are pulling some of our favorites our of retirement and showing you how they work with new products!  A great stamp set is a gift that keeps on giving!

So one of my favorite stamp sets of all time is Branch Out.  This is a set that can be used for almost any kind of card and never disappoints!  I love it so much.  And yet sadly it has languished in a stack for much too long.  For those of you who shop on Ebay, you may have even seen this stamp selling for crazy prices.  I wanted to see if I could make it look current and so I used it to create this super clean birthday card.  All the focus is on the beautiful image!!  Cards with white space are so popular now and a set like really shines.  I stamped the tree in Soft Suede and then added leaves and flowers using  Pear Pizzazz and Pink Pirouette.  The tire swing is stamped in Momento Black (because this is the BEST black ink!) and so is the sentiment.  The butterflies are Lost Lagoon and that color is really pretty with this palette.  My sentiment is from a work horse set called Four You that is a must have.

I know what you are thinking… “Great Jen, I don’t have the set and I’m not willing to spend a billion dollars to get it.  What do I do?”  I have a solution that you will LOVE.  In the latest Occasions catalog there is a new stamp set called Sheltering Tree.  Wanna see??

So it has the tree, an adorable swing, replace the butterflies with a bike and…just look at that….add a sentiment from the same set!  Yeah.  I know.  And, NOT a billion dollars, lol!  All of these together are just $24.95 US.  So cool!

Now we are supposed to pull out a throwback picture of ourselves.  Hmmm…….  I thought it would be fun to show you where my journey to the Artisan Team began in earnest.  This is a picture from my first Stampin’ Up Convention.  It is here that I got to know my second level supervisor, Lisa Curcio.  Lisa and my upline Brandi were the ones that I told first about considering entering the Artisan competition.  They, along with some of my local stamping friends gave me the courage to submit my projects.  I cannot even give words to how grateful I am for their support and for the many, many gifts that Stampin’ Up has brought to my life.

I have some cards all ready for you over the next few days.  I’ve been getting to work in the stamp room and hoping to get back into a better routine of posting.  I’m so glad you stopped by today and I look forward to seeing again soon!

Okay, off to go visit the awesome Mercedes Weber!  You will be wow’d, as always!

And you can click our logo above to get to the Fancy Friday Pinterest page!

Click HERE to purchase these wonderful Stampin’ Up products!

Stamps:   Branch Out; Paper:  Whisper White; Ink:  Soft Suede, Pear Pizzazz, Pink Pirouette, Lost Lagoon, Momento Black