My Other Creations: Smarty Pants Trophies

I often run the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge Blog's weekly themes past my husband and parents to get my creative juices flowing.  This week's theme is the letter "I."  When I asked my mom what came to mind for the letter I, the first three things she said (and I kid you not) were: isotope, ibis and incarceration.  This is the problem with having a genius mother!  I didn't even know what an ibis was (apparently some type of long-legged bird) and I certainly didn't have an isotope stamp handy.  But bless her, my mom did inspire my "I" craft after all because I wanted to pay homage to her intelligence!  So I made a little trio of trophies to celebrate the lovable smarty pants's in my life.

I started out with Tim Holtz's trophies, which are a shiny silver.  I Gesso'd the heck out of them, then painted them with Dina Wakley's acrylic paints and Tim Holtz Distress paint.  While they were drying, I went looking for bases and decided to use some old ugly wooden stamps that I'd kept for just such a nonsensical purpose.

I cut out squares of paper from Prima's Garden Fable collection and glued them onto the wood stamp blocks.  I also stamped out the sentiments and glued them on as well.

To fill my trophies, I used two girl images as well as one from Tim Holtz's Found Relatives cards (the girl with the turquoise crown).  I glued a wooden spool into each trophy, then glued the girls to the tops of the spools and wrapped a "yarn nest" around each.

I added some oomph to the trophies by gluing on some Washi tape (which wouldn't have stayed put without the glue) and adhered my trophies to their bases.  Done!

Sometimes we tease my mom about how smart she is, but it's more of an "in-awe" type of teasing.  I grew up with a set of encyclopedias in the front room which, though now is at least 20 years out of date, still sits in my parents' house to this day.  Whenever my mom doesn't know the answer to something, or wants to learn more, she'll drop whatever she's doing and look it up in the encyclopedias.  She raised me to love learning and I owe her for keeping that love of learning alive in me.  In addition to mom, my dad and my older brother saved me from a dark and dreary death in math while growing up, so I pretty much hit the jackpot with a super smart fam.  I'm so grateful to all of them for teaching me that learning is cool and that it never has to stop.

For my trophies, I used the following supplies from Simon Says Stamp:

Tim Holtz Trophy Cups	Prima White Heavy Gesso	Dina Wakley Lime Acrylic Paint	Dina Wakley LEMON Heavy Body Acrylic Paints	Dina Wakley TURQUOISE Heavy Body Acrylic Paints	Worn Lipstick Distress Paint	Tim Holtz Picked Raspberry Distressed Paint
Tim Holtz Squeezed Lemonade Distress Paint	Tim Holtz Distress Paint In Spiced Marmalade	Prima A4 Garden Fable Paper	Hero Arts Basic Alphabet Stamps	Ranger Archival Jet Black Ink Pad	Black Sharpie Fine Point Pen	Kaisercraft Blue Bay 6x6 Paper
Idea-ology - Found Relatives	Aleene′s Turbo Dry Glue	Ranger Non Stick Craft Sheet

I can't wait to see what inspires you and what interesting and inventive things you come up with for this week's "I" theme (see what I did there)?  Be sure to upload your creations to the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge Blog for the rest of us to see and to give yourself a shot at winning a $50 gift voucher to the Simon Says Stamp store.