Friday, 1 August 2014

We're into August and a new challenge...

Hello everyone, welcome to August's new challenge!

Regulars amongst you will know that each month one of our amazing Design Team Members chooses our theme. This month it is the turn of Butterfly (aka Alison) and she's chosen a terrific topic, sure to be a hit with many of you, it's...........


We're looking for entries that focus upon the written word. Your project may be based upon a stamped saying, a proverb, an old adage, a piece of poetry, whatever grabs you. What the challenge is NOT about is sentiments for greetings cards.

As usual, we will be visually serenading you throughout the whole month (every other day in fact) with a view to encouraging, motivating and inspiring you to get out your crafty goodies, make a project (or three) and join in!  >;o)  At the end of the month we will randomly select a winner (using random.org) who will receive the princely prize of a £20 shop voucher from our fabulous sponsor, Country View Crafts.  Alison willl also be choosing her Top 3 favourites and her Special Mention who will all win blog badges and the chance to be a guest DT with us the following month.

Please remember to follow the rules because entries that don't comply cannot be selected as a winner.

Heading up our catwalk of beautiful projects this month is our guest, winner of last month's challenge, Dragonllew (Jenny)...



Hi I'm Jenny aka Dragonllew from Bournemouth I'm married to Mark and have 3 gorgeous children who keep me very busy . In my spare time I love to craft and having been crafting for as long as I can remember, for the last few years my passion has been card making. My favourite crafting item has to be my pro markers, I love colouring up stamps with them.


I decided to alter a plain Kraft notebook for this months challenge. Because of the size of the book my normal 6 x 6 papers were too small so I had to dig through my rather old stack of 12 x 12 papers where I found these old Fancy Pants papers which I used to create the base layers. I coloured up my favourite digi stamp at the moment with my beloved pro markers adding some glossy accents to make his glasses pop. I printed the quote directly on to the patterned paper and attached it using a paper clip.


And now for the projects from our permanent DTM's...


I've created a simple tag with words at the heart of it.  I started with one of the spare tags I created when I was playing with the Tim Holtz June tag technique.  And if the words are going to take centre stage they deserve a touch of glossy embossing too!




I had lots of fun creating this shabby word piece. Stamping, die cutting, lots of ink and various techniques all went together to make it. For those of you looking for more details, my step x step is HERE.


Great theme for a challenge :) Always love to use words and quotes on  things I make.  I had left the first pages of my little moleskine journal clear but decided now was the time to fill them! Seemed like the perfect quote for the opening pages......


....pop over to my blog to see how it evolved. Donna xx 



I have decorated a wooden plaque with acrylic paints, I am planning to cover all the door panels in the house with my decorated wooden plaques this is No 4.
You can get full details of how this was made from my Blog.



I love words, they often act as the springboard for my ideas and so I was thrilled when I saw we had this as a challenge. I took my moleskin journal and roughly drew some houses in pencil and then wrote, by hand, everything home means to me around the houses. Then I coloured the houses in with Portfolio Pastels. I painted the background with watered down paint and revealed some of the writing in areas by wiping them with a baby wipe. I live at number 4 so I stamped a heart on that roof. I love these pages, as much for the personal message in the background as well as for the lovely bright houses in the foreground! There is more detail on my blog.



For our wonderful theme this month I have chosen the written word and the lost art of letter writing for the theme of my tag.  After creating my background using Vintage Photo and Evergreen Bough I kept the embellishments quite simple.  There are more details on my blog.



I went bright, beautiful and JOFY stamps for my first project. With paints, stencils and embossing paste to the Bg; Yellow is such a joyful colour. My words for this thought provoking statement were all cut using my cricut machine. More details on my Blog.


Journalling was never something that I thought I would be interested in. How wrong could I be ! Words are the perfect embellishment for journal pages and for the ones I'm sharing today I've been lucky enough to play with the fab new Colour Bloom sprays ! For the details hop over to my blog .



I love all things wordy and playing with words always brings to mind my collection of gorgeous wordy stamps, so what better way to play with words than to create a mini album to hold some of my favourite words to live by . For all the details and what's inside please pop across to inkypinkycraft .



We support and encourage crafting of all genres here from contemporary to vintage, from CAS to shabby chic and grunge, from card making, scrapping, tag art, journalling, altered art and home decor. Our individual posts commence on Sunday and will feature every alternate day throughout the month. We try and bring you DT makes that cover as much of the spectrum as possible - all we'd like now is for you to get crafting and join in!  >:o)

Have a wonderful August!

Chris and the team xxx