Happy Earth Day!

Today is a banner day, dear readers. Yes, today marks several important events in my world. This post turned out to be rather long, so get a cuppa and settle in. You will be rewarded. :)

First, today is EARTH DAY! In celebration of the day, the Jingle Belles have issued us a recycled challenge from last year, which is to recycle or repurpose something to use on your card.

How convenient for me I'd saved some frosted acetate packaging just for an opportunity such as this! Here's my card, then I'll explain:

The papers I used here were a prezzie from one of my dearest bloggy pals, Lauren, who just happens to be one of the chief Belles. *waves* I ADORE this paper! *mwah* The ribbon is from Miss Lauren's package that contained the papers.

The piece of stripey paper is some vellum I rescued from my OMG, WON'T SOMEONE PULEEZE TAKE ALL THIS VELLUM pile. I wanted a layer on my card, but I didn't want to completely obliterate the pretty musical pattern beneath it.

Because I'm all about sharing, here is a close-up of the acetate bird:

 You can see I've managed to attach the paper circle upside down. Yes, I have. But hopefully you'll be so WOWed by that bird that you won't notice ... except I just told you. ;/

The bird. Remember that die-cut class I'm taking? Well, after 3 days of attempting to cut the frosted acetate packaging with wafer-thin dies, and failing miserably, I had a moment of clarity and remembered I should have been using a steel-ruled die to cut the acetate. DUH! So I used one of my SU Movers & Shapers shapes to cut the bird. I (believe it or not) inked up the back of the bird with Versamark, applied some sparkly embossing powder and heat-embossed it. Yes, it curled up, and I was afraid I'd discovered a new shrink plastic, but it didn't shrink, and eventually flattened back out. I've attached it with Crystal Effects, which wasn't quite dry when I took this photo.

Why so much trouble? Because I wanted to see the pretty, upside-down music paper through the bird!

Now, about those letters:

 These are some silver glitter stick-on letters I got last year, and have used ... never. I used the gold ones once last year. I tried to color these with my Ranger Broken China Tumbled Glass Distress Stain, but it just ran off the top of the letters. Bummer.

Or did it? When I gave up and tried to peel off the backing, Look what I found:

Oh, sure, it soaked through, but failed to color the silver glitter. Perfect. I had to use my trusty MS gel glue to get these to stick.

One more thing: this card was based on the current Freshly Made Sketches challenge:

 that I turned 90 degrees to fit my tired brain:

Enough whining about my card. Guess what today is, besides Earth Day?!?! Today is ... are you sitting down? ... my FIVE-YEAR BLOGIVERSARY!  Yes, my beloved 3 (maybe 4) readers, I have been blathering about nothing for FIVE YEARS! Here is my first post from Sunday, April 22nd, 2007. WHO KNEW I had so much nothing to say?! To celebrate this momentous occasion, and in my continuing theme of purging duplicate crafty items, I'm having a G-I-V-E-A-W-A-Y! That's right! One lucky person will win this:

That's two Cuttlebug embossing folders and a set of Nestabilities Petite Ovals Large. These can be yours by just leaving a comment on this post by 7:00 pm EDT on Wednesday, April 25th. I'll draw a random comment and that will be that!

Thanks for reading this far, and thanks for stopping by!