Jingle Belles Rock #21 - Visions of Sugar Plums

I'm writing this on Monday night to publish on Wednesday morning, because I have another post that HAS to go Tuesday morning so I need to delay this one by a day. Got that? I'm telling you because this means I didn't wait until the last minute to get out this week's Jingle Belles card. ;/ Oh, and the first thing I do when I create a blog post for a future day is update the date so when I accidentally hit Publish while I'm editing, it doesn't go live. I CAN learn from my mistakes. I just thought you should know.

So - this week's Jingle Belles Rock challenge is Visions of Sugar Plums, and our guest Hostess with the Mostest is amanda profumo (aka: Crafty Paper Girl) who gave us this as our inspiration:



You know what I saw? GAH pink and GAH purple and GAH ballerinas. YOU'RE KILLING ME, HERE, PEOPLE! Sigh. The Belles told us: instead of an ordinary color challenge we're calling this a "photo inspiration", so you're free to use as many--or as few--bits of the style board that inspire you, in whatever ways you choose!

Well, what if I choose to intensely dislike pink and purple and ballerinas, eh? THEN what?!?!??!! I think they are taking this "challenge" thing way too far. (I kid ... *waves at The Belles*)

Okay, so I stewed for a bit and thought for a bit more and decided to go with the Nutcracker idea. Hmmm, so that means I could do the ballerina thing, but a plain ballerina card would not exude "Christmas", so hmmm ... Then I got bright idea #8464, that I'd use the ballerina stamp but on shrink film stuff so it would get really small, then I'd hang it on a tree as an ornament.

Here are my three (yes, three) stages of shrunken ballerinas:

Please notice the one on the far left has her arm stuck behind her back. I tried to un-stick it, but I gave up and went for #2. That time I forced her arm to un-stick, and now it is longer than her body - she is deformed. So I went for #3 (I am nothing if not persistent). That one worked! Then I held it up to my tree image and it was too big for the tree, so I scrapped the whole idea and had to start over. This stamping stuff is HARD!

FINALLY, I decided to stamp the full-sized ballerina and have her in the foreground, so I stamped the tree to the top left of the card to make it look like it was in the background, and this is what I ended up with:

I KNOW! GAH pink and GAH purple and GAH ballerinas! I may barf from all this pink. First, to force the Nutcracker thing, I found a nutcracker image on the Interwebz, printed it on my still-not-wireless printer and cut it out. It's difficult to tell from my crack photography skills, but the tree is brown, the ornaments are Perfect Plum (get it? Plum? I'm going for bonus points ... work with me here ...), I drew the tinsel with a silver glitter pen, and that star used to be covered with Stickles until I had an unfortunate craftastrophe in my ghetto photo studio - the card fell over and the still-wet Stickles came off on the base of the photo studio. Oh, and the ballerina is popped up on dimensionals to make her even more front-and-center.

I'm telling you, these challenges are taking years (YEARS, DO YOU HEAR ME?!) off of my life. But I think YOU should play along with The Belles, so come on over and join us, won't you? :):):)

Thanks for stopping by!