Freshly Made Sketches #40; Pixie's Crafty Workshop Snippets Challenge #25; and The Play Date Cafe Color Splash

How's Thursday treating you?

Today my card was made with three challenges in mind and one sister.  In no particular order.  Wait, in alpha order:

Freshly Made Sketches is always a great sketch challenge.  This week the sketch was designed by the inestimable artist, Lesley, and her sketch is:

(Okay, first, let's please have a round of applause for me because I flipped that sketch, baby, my first time evah!!  Thank you.  I'm so proud!)

Pixie's Crafty Workshop Snippets Challenge #25.  This challenge is making me remember to USE my Leftover Landfill of bits and pieces!

The Play Date Cafe has a "Color Splash" (and a design call - check it!), thus:

This week, we are asking you to create using

Black ... White ... Blue

So what happened was, I knew I wanted to make a card this week using the sketch, but what card I did not know until I saw the Color Splash colors. 

As it turns out, I was going to tell you today anyway about my Iowa sister, Donna - and now I've made a card for her as well.  You see, Donna fell into a creek (and I'm not even kidding, she IS my sister!) which was hysterically funny because her butt plopped right in the water!  Then it just as quickly was not funny when it became apparent that she had badly hurt her right shoulder.  (The MRI shows several torn muscles and we find out on Monday if she will need surgery.  Now Donna is what you'd call a Real Trooper, but if she does need surgery, I may be flying out to Iowa to help her out for a bit.)

Some of you may remember that I took a fall a couple of weeks ago and that after I stopped rolling and landed on my back, for some inexspitable reason, I straightened my legs so my feet were up in the air, like a dead cow.  You guessed it!  Donna tells me she did the exact same thing!  Whoa!

So when I saw the colors of the PDCC, of course I saw them as black and blue.  I thought of our falls, which left us black and blue, and of our tendency to imitate dead cows after we fall.  Now what stamp would portray that effectively?  Well, of course:  "Toby is TWO," by the extraordinary artist Mo Manning!

I hope that Mo will forgive the artistic license I took when I altered her image and gave Toby paper-pieced boobs and a scarf so that now he looks just like my sister (or me)!!

Thanks for sitting through that, if you did.  Thankfully, it takes less time to read it than it did to type it!  And thank you for any positive vibes you float off to Donna!

It's time once again to introduce you to some new visitors in the auditorium.  Please join me in welcoming the very talented Tracey McNeely of In My Creative Opinion and Mary H. of Carolina Cards by Mary H.  Thank you so much for joining us!

Enjoy!   As always, thank you for stopping by to visit.   Special thanks to you if you take the time to join as a follower or leave a comment!

(Oh, real quick, I'm sorry to tell you that no one won the $10,000 prize I was planning to give out yesterday to the first person who made a crack comment about me being married to a relative of the frankfurter.)

Paper:  PTI white; SU DSP blue;
  unknown houndstooth; Stampland glossy
Stamps:  Mo Manning's "Toby is Two" MO104;
  Hero Arts "Life is Not Perfect" CL387
Ink:  Memento tuxedo black; Marvy markers
Crystal Stickers black beads; pop dots