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With so many clever takes on the theme of holiday architecture, you guys certainly do make it hard to feature just a trio of cards at a time, but here are three cards that made us especially happy this fortnight:

Helen of Helen's Craft Haven

...knew she didn't have to put an entire town on her card OR make any reference to Bethlehem; but if a gal has the perfect stamps for a particular challenge, and can use them this beautifully, we wouldn't dream of stopping her!

Laura of LaurAngolo

...made us remember that as much as we love a great minimalist design, we also love cards with loads of layers, texture and sparkle. Yeah, we're kind of swooning right now...

Lindsay of Bashful Blogging

...gave us a bit of "card envy" with this clever concept. We love the white-on-white of all those embossed houses, we love the brilliant choice of sentiment, and we really (really!) love those two red hearts! Yowza!

and just one more photo for you, because our lovely friend and fellow Belle June Houck was unable to access her blog and link up her card because of computer issues, but it's sooooo cute and totally needs to be seen!!! ♥

Many thanks to everyone who played along, we are always wowed by the cards you link up! We'll be back at midnight with a brand new prompt we hope will ring a few bells with our Belles!!! ♥♥♥

I'll be *HOME* for Christmas

We're still celebrating holiday architecture, and you've still got lots of time to make a card with any type of building on it and link up at the "Little Town of Bethlehem" post right beneath this one! Meanwhile, here's what we made this week:

Lauren's Other Card

Lauren says, "This sparkly little house and the uber-cute reindeer couple were just a few of the stickers on a sheet of adorable Doodlebug Icons I bought recently. I've dipped into some of the brand new Eyelet Outlet brads to dress these sweeties up even more: the boy reindeer has donned some Antler Brads, while the girl reindeer is wearing a hat that comes in the Elf Brads set. i've also added some Heart Enamels, plus a bit of Skinny Washi, and Holiday Dots Washi. I'd love to take credit for thinking up that super-fun diagonal swathe of tape, but actually, I just followed the current Sketch Saturday (week #429) layout."

Stephanie's Other Card

Stephanie says, "I played with fun papers again this week ... a die cut sentiment and this one came together quickly."

O' Little TOWN of Bethlehem

This week's prompt is called, "O' Little TOWN of Bethlehem" and if you're wondering why we emphasized the "TOWN", it's because we want to see holiday cards with at least one building on them. We confess that at first the assignment seemed kind of tough, but when we started looking through our stash of holiday ingredients, we found patterned paper with cozy christmas cottages, stamps of gingerbread houses, stickers with Santa's magical castle at the North Pole; not to mention cityscapes, eskimo igloos, lovely snow-covered churches and yes, even a stable with a manger in it! So there's a lot of ways to go with this, and we hope you'll have fun discovering at least one you'd like to pursue.

Here's what we made this week:

Stephanie's Card

Stephanie says, "My buildings are courtesy of this pretty Christmas Magic holiday paper by Shimelle.  I used a sketch from The Challenge at a sticker sentiment to finish the design."

Lauren's Card

Lauren says, "Something I didn't realize until I started looking for "ingredients" for my card is that another great source of Christmas building images is snowglobes... and I had a bunch of them! This one --and its attendant embellishments and sentiment-- came from a pack of My Mind's Eye cardstock elements. I combined papers from a few different manufacturers' Christmas collections that just happened to match, and used this week's Sketch Saturday layout (#428) to help me arrange everything." 

Link your cards right here by 6pm (EST) on Wednesday, September 21st. Keyword for galleries and Flickr is JB:16:19.

An InLinkz Link-up