Inspired by Brian King’s blog today, I decided to look back at my favourite cards from this year – although it’s actually only 7 months of card making. I was going to pick my top 7 but I’ve been unable to cut further than 8 so I decided that I’d stick with 8, one for each of the months that I’ve made cards in (I started right at the end of May!). So here are my favourites, in chronological order:

This was one of the first Christmas cards that I made, back in September. I really fell for one of the colour combinations in the Holiday catalogue – pear pizzazz, lost lagoon and pool party – and made it into a rather non-traditional Christmas card. I still love it. The post back from Labor Day can be found here.

This very happy Happy Birthday card came about after my Critique Board basically dared me to use more colour. I’d been using two or, when feeling brave, three colours on a card and I’d previously produced the above card where all the flowers were the same colour. They demanded more colour and read my mind when I thought about a few and said “LOTS of colour”. I grabbed the regals ink pads and stamped away and absolutely love the result. Here’s the original post.

I love this card for a few reasons. It evolved out of a mistake – I’d messed up the trees when stamping and rather than throwing out the error, it sat on my desk for a few days until I realised that I could use just part of the image. I think it ended up better than the original that I was duplicating – mostly because I liked it so much and also really liked making it. The original post is here.

This card I was especially pleased with because it was for a challenge and orange has been intimidating me. I think I’ve conquered my issue with it now. Or at least somewhat. You can see the original post here.

The card is one of my favourites because it makes me laugh. And it was so appropriate for one of my colleagues at work – you can read the whole story here.

This card was also for a challenge; the colours were baked brown sugar, cherry cobbler and very vanilla. I had been making a lot of cards with the Stampin’ Up! Get Your Santa On! set but I hadn’t used either the JOY banner or the present so I added a personal challenge to use them on this card. I was extremely pleased with the result. Here’s the original post.

This fresh and spring like card was made a couple of weeks ago with the new 3 step Stampin’ Up! Lotus Blossom stamp set which will be available next week in the Sale-a-bration catalogue. I was very pleased with the result and have been quite flattered that it’s been pinned and re-pinned quite a lot. The original post is here.

The final of my favourite cards for the year is one of the Christmas cards that I sent. I love the simplicity – and of course it had to have gold embossing on it! The original post was here.

Looking back at the 440 or so cards that I’ve made (don’t worry, they weren’t all unique) I can definitely see an evolution in my card making helped in part by the challenges that I’ve joined. I’m excited to see what will happen in 2015 as I continue to make cards.