Starting Early- Holiday Wishes 4 our Kids!

It's another fun Saturday at Send a Smile 4 Kids and we are Starting Early for Holiday Wishes 4 our Kids!  It may seem early to make and send holiday cards, but to have time to get them to our hospitals and our kids, we need them by early December. We are also announcing the following exciting news:

Starting Monday November 7th through November 20th, SAS4Kids is thrilled to be partnering with Paper Creations Ink for a CARD DRIVE for our kids! At SAS4Kids and at PCI, the themes of our challenges are "Holiday Wishes for Kids", and we are asking all who participate in the challenges to please mail your holiday cards to SAS4Kids to cheer a child who is inpatient in a Children's Hospital over the holidays. You can enter your children's holiday card at both blogs for twice as many chances to win a great prize from our sponsors! Then please mail it (and other other cards you have that are appropriate for children in a hospital) to any of our addresses listed here.

SAS4Kids has three generous sponsors for this challenge: Stamp Shoppe Creations is offering one random winner a $15 gift certificate; Shelley's Images is giving a lucky random winner a $9 gift certificate; and Designed 2 Delight is giving a random winner a $10 voucher AND each of the Top Three a $5 voucher! That's right: our Top Three as voted on by our design team wins a sponsor prize this time from Designed 2 Delight as well as a Blog Badge for your blog and a guest design team opportunity in a future challenge!

Because we had such great sponsor images to work with, I had to play with each of them, of course! Above is a fun reindeer resting after his long journey on Christmas Eve from Heidi at Stamp Shoppe Creations. I am lucky enough to live just blocks away from The Stamp Shoppe and consider the owner and artist, Heidi, a close personal friend. The holly background on some of the strips of paper is one of her designs too. I stamped and paper pieced the main image and created the background with strips of dp and embossed lines.

This fun card uses a beautiful Christmas morning image from Shelley's Images that bring back lovely memories for me. Our beloved kitty was a Christmas present to my husband from me nine Christmases ago now. I started with a scalloped green card and paper pieced and colored the scene and added red pearl pen pearls on the scallops.

My last holiday card for our kids features a wonderful digital stamp from Designed 2 Delight. I love my Believe dog and again did some paper piecing, embossing and added white flock on his hat. The sentiment is also from D2D.

The front flap opens like a mini easel card to reveal an inside piece for a special message and I used a Martha Stewart snowman punch on that piece for a fun touch.

So come join us at both SAS4Kids and PCI for these challenges and then please consider sending in your children's holiday card to cheer the many children at our seven hospitals who are inpatient over the holidays.

I am entering these cards in the Anything Goes challenges at Paper Take Weekly and Whimsical Wednesdays and the paper piecing challenge at Pixie Dust Studio.

Stamping smiles 4 our kids, Karen