Happy Friday and Happy Cupcake Day! First of all, I wanted to thank you all for making my birthday such a special celebration last Friday! I had so much fun hopping around and seeing all your wonderful creations and birthday wishes for little ‘ole me! This weekend is sure to be another exciting one… I can hardly wait for the TE Farewell Party tomorrow! I’ve ordered the cupcakes, purchased the cutest cupcake plates to eat them on, and priced all of my stamping stuff for the garage sale. I excited to meet everyone and see old friends again! But first… for today’s cupcake sketch I decided to pull out my Cupcake Key Ingredients again. I just LOVE these! And these adorable Sweet Treats Icons glitter stickers were sitting right next to my Key Ingredients kit. It was so easy to create this scene of sweets with the stickers! I just added some rhinestone bling to the cherries and some Multi-colored Twinkles to the sprinkles on the ice cream sundae and cupcake. The cupcake is popped up on foam tape to add some depth to the scene and then I used my Copic markers to ground the images. The sketch doesn’t call for a bow, but I just couldn’t resist a little ribbon! This was totally a 10 minute card and since I’m not used to spending just 10 minutes on a card I decided to create a whole set of cards! All of the supplies were already out on my table so it was easy to create three more sweet scenes with the stickers. And for a little variation, I flipped the sketch and created one card for each of the four possible sketch variations. The sentiments on all of these cards are from the For the Love of Cupcakes stamp set. My finished set of cards took less than an hour…gotta love that! But after photographing and editing all of these I decided to go back and add ribbon to each card (I just couldn’t resist!) so try to picture that in your mind. That’s it for my cards, and now I’m so excited to introduce you to this week’s Featured Cupcake Sampler! Rachel Sztonyk has been catching my eye with her cuppie creations since we released our very first sets in September, but she blew me away with this cute sunning cuppie card! And she’s got another bright and fun card to share with us today using the Sweet Celebration stamp set. The cute little button and bow she added are the perfect touch! You can check out all the details on this card and the rest of Rachel’s beautiful work on her blog: Gingerbread Gallery! Thanks so much for sampling the sketch this week, Rachel! Now it’s your turn to try the sketch! Just create a card using this sketch and link your creation below with Mr. Linky by Friday, June 26th. I’ll choose the cutest creation from the submissions to be the Featured Cupcake Sampler. Your design and blog will be featured on my blog during Cupcake Friday. You’re not required to use cupcakes for the challenge, but if you got ’em why not use ’em!? If you’re uploading to Splitcoast use keyword TECC73 (for Taylored Expressions Cupcake Challenge 73). I’m also giving away a free Tiny Twinkle to one random winner from among all the people who upload their sketch challenge cards to PaperCraftPlanet using the same TECC73 keyword. So while you’re uploading your card to SCS and/or your blog, hop over to PCP and enter yourself in the fun there! Now last week during my birthday celebration I offered a $25 gift certificate to one random participant in the sketch challenge. Well, that winner is Dawn Barghorn! Dawn must be a lucky lady because she was also the grand prize winner of our store opening anniversary celebration in March! Dawn, just send me a quick email at tayloredexpressions@gmail.com and I’ll email you the gift certificate code. Thanks for stopping by today! I always look forward to seeing what you come up with using the sketch!

The Cupcake Crew has done it again this week with more fabulous sketch challenge inspiration… don’t miss it! Donna Baker, Jackie Pedro, Jami Sibley, Lynn Mercurio, Monika Davis, Sherrie Siemens, Stephanie Hargis, Vicki Chrisman