Challenge 23, Week Four

Hello everyone, and welcome to our final week of Challenge Twenty-Three on the Chocolate Baroque Challenge Blog. Thank you for your visits and lovely comments throughout the month, we really appreciate your support, and we love reading what you have to say. We hope that you have been enjoying the challenge and the inspiration provided by the Design Team this month. There is still plenty of time to enter the challenge, and you can add your projects to the link in this post.

This week, we are taking a look at a few of the entries that we have received for the current challenge, and showcasing them on the blog.
Here is one of two beautiful cards that Kate has entered into the challenge this month:

Shelagh has cleverly combined images to create her entry:

Joan's striking design uses repeat stamping, and this would make a great masculine or feminine card:

We have a super email entry from Tanya:

Finally, Penny's vibrant flower garden card completes our roundup:

We have more Design Team projects for you this week, using our challenge colours for inspiration. Firstly, a lovely peacock themed card from Magda.She has created a watery background, and added multicoloured feathers as her main image.

Magda has also created this beautiful journal cover using some of our flower stamps. She has added great texture to the cover.

Two projects from Anne are next. The first card uses stamps from the Gothic Fragments stamp set, and is really vibrant:

The second has a lovely flower from the Diamante Delights stamp set as a fabulous embellishment.

Thank you so much girls for your lovely artwork.

From time to time, we are going to start giving you a chance to meet members of the Design Team through the blog posts on the Challenge Blog. This month, we are starting with myself, so here goes!

For those of you who are new to Chocolate Baroque, or who have not been visiting the Challenge Blog and Design Team Blog very long, you will not know me all that well. For those of you that have been around for a bit longer, apologies for repeating some of what you will already know!

I am Judith Smith, Design Team Leader of the Chocolate Baroque Design Team. I have been on the Design Team since 2010, and it has always been a privelege and a source of great pride to work with Chocolate Baroque stamps. I have been crafting all of my life, as far back as I can remember, and learned lots of different skills from my Mum as a child. We still craft together now, and she is well into her seventies.

I came to card making, and discovered stamping in the late nineties, it was a turning point for me, and something that I enjoy more than any other craft I have tried. I love mixed media, and trying all sorts of different techniques, getting inky, painty fingers, and experimenting with new products. I enjoy making my own embellishments, and incorporating other crafts like jewellery, felting, and fabric, etc., into my projects. I enjoy collecting old book pages, ribbons, anything that will add to what I am creating. However, I also really enjoy creating a quick and simple, one-layer card that requires nothing more than some ink and a stamp.

I have always found a peacefulness in crafting, my blog banner reads 'With Crafting comes Tranquility', and I find that to be very true. Crafting seems to wipe away the stresses of every day life. I have also found some of my best friends through the crafting world.

I live at home on the Norfolk/Suffolk border, with my Husband, who I met at school, and we were childhood sweethearts from the age of fifteen. We have two grown up children and two cats called Bella and Poppy. We also seem to have acquired a lodger, in the form of my Daughter's boyfriend, so the house is very busy!

My favourite colours are purple and teal, I love to wear these colours, and create with them too, but I do try not to use them all of the time, that's why I love the challenge blog so much, because we stretch ourselves to use colours that might be outside our natural comfort zone. I  have created a piece of artwork reflecting my favourite colours, my love of mixed media, and another favourite of mine- butterflies.

I have used a Tando tag, painted with gesso, I added some texture paste through a flourish stencil, and allowed it to dry. I spritzed the tag with Decoart media sprays, and then added a bit of water to dilute them slightly. I added some gilding wax to the raised area and around the edge. I then stamped a word from the Artistic Expressions stamp set, using Jet Black Archival ink. I stamped two butterflies from The Rose Tree stamp set onto a piece of scrap card, and painted them using some of the spray and a water brush. I cut the butterflies out, and glued them to the tag, adding black flower stamens for antennae.

So there you go, I hope that you have enjoyed reading a little bit about me, and my crafting life. If you would like to leave a comment about your favourite colour combinations, that would be great.

We will be back next week with a brand new challenge, but hope to see lots more entries for the current challenge in the meantime. Don't forget, if you have any questions, and cannot find the answers on the blog pages, please send us a private message using the contact form located at the very end of this post; you will see it after the comments section.