RAK's, challenges, and widgets!

Hi all! I've been wanting to put a subscribing widget onto my blog for a little while now and I finally did it! In my left panel you'll see a feedblitz subscriber thingy. Just type in your address, click the button, then confirm from your email account and you'll get email updates whenever I post to my blog! That way you won't have to worry about missing anything, or checking my blog several times just to see I haven't posted! I hope you ALL take advantage of it! Also, I decided to change up the look of my blog a little for Spring. What do you all think?

Well, I've been a bad RAKer lately. I haven't posted some GREAT RAKs I've received, so here they are:

This first one is from my fabulous friend Julie. She knows I like Tink, so she made me this card! I can't believe I didn't post this sooner. I guess I've just been enjoying it sitting on my little phone table too much! THANKS JULES!!!

This one is from Miss Lillian Young Friday (I love her name!). It was sent to me with 2 adorable Studio G clear stamp sets for Jen's February RAK. THANKS LILLIAN! You can check out her blog here: http://www.creativefxbylil.blogspot.com/

This next one is a Thank You from Debbie Riches down in Texas. It was her birthday last month and I sent her a birthday RAK so this is what I got in return. How cool is this card?! The front looks like the Texas flag, and inside there are Texas punch-outs with the flag colors behind them. It is so neat! THANKS DEBBIE!And this lovely RAK collection is from Miss Dottie K. She RAKed me for Jen's March RAK. The tallest card isn't a card at all, it's a notebook! Perfect for my little phone table in my room. And of course the chocolate nuggets are gone already! I ate them right after shooting this pic. And as I was munching, I noticed that I forgot to add the little baggy of clear buttons she also sent me! DUH! So I took another pic of the inside of the notebook and the buttons. I love the detail on the top of the pad of paper. I'm gonna have fun making cute little spring baskets with this ribbon and those buttons. THANKS DOTTIE!

So, now that I've posted a bunch of pics of other people's work, I'll post a few of mine. I am participating in a couple challenges for Gina K.'s release party. One challenge was to use the colors taken with teal, pumpkin pie, and soft sky (or cool caribbean) in card. I only have pumpkin pie! So I improvised with some colors that I had that were as close to those SU! colors as I could get. Here it is:

What do you think? When I saw the colors together I immediately thought of this stamp set to use with it. The worms and sentiment are stamped in Pumpkin Pie. I also wanted to add the brown color just to make the other colors pop a little more. I think it turned out much better than my original plan!

I also wanted to do Beate's inspiration challenge. These two little 3x3 cards were indeed inspired by her inspiration piece. You can see it on her blog here: http://beate.blogs.splitcoaststampers.com/2008/03/11/be-inspired-challenge-4/

Can someone please teach me how to link onto words so I don't have to keep putting those long, ugly addresses for links? THANKS, I'd appreciate it! And finally, I was playing around with a little gift thingy I was making (more on that at another time) and ventured off into making these cute cards. I always need "go to" cards for different occassions that pop up and I think these will work. I made 4 of them (2 of each design) because this designer paper was just screaming at me. It was saying "USE ME! I'M BEAUTIFUL! USE ME!" So I did. And now I have NONE left! Hahaha! But I love the cards so that's ok.

Whew! What a long post! That's all for now folks. Hope you all have wonderful Wednesdays.