Challenge 24, Week Four

Hello everyone, and welcome to another week on the Chocolate Baroque Challenge Blog. Thank you for the wonderful entries that have been coming in for the challenge so far. We hope that you are enjoying the current colour scheme and the inspiration provided by the Design Team each week for you. We hope that if you have not entered already, you will take part, and share in the creative fun this month. You can add your project to the link in this post.

We have some more super inspiration from the Design Team this week. Vronnie has created two beautiful cards using Brushos for her backgrounds:

Anne's has created a dramatic sky for her card adding foliage from the Wild Meadow stamp set.

Magda has created a musical tag, with toning ribbon:

Thank you so much girls for your projects this week, we hope that they will inspire you to join in with the challenge and create something yourselves.

We are taking the opportunity to meet another member of our Design Team this week, and on this occasion, it is Zoe's turn to talk a little bit about herself, so that you can get to know her a little bit better.

Hello, I'm Zoe. I live in a lovely Dickensian seaside town called Broadstairs on the South East coast in Kent. I'm 54 and married to Steve, have a Daughter Ashley, who is 32 and lives in Canada. We have an adorable Shih Tzu called Ernie, he's now 11 years old.
I've been a Foster carer for eight years now and mostly look after babies. I owned and managed my own Hair Salon for twenty years previously. Having been in the industry for over thirty years, I decided I needed a new direction, plus my back and neck suffered as a result of the standing in odd positions for so long. Although carrying babies around day and night isn't exactly a walk in the park for my back either, hahaha!
My Great Nan taught me to knit when I was five, and I've dabbled all my life with various projects involving mostly paper and card. I think that I was born with a pair of scissors in my hand!
I've always been creative and have a good eye for colour and composition. I started seriously card making eighteen years ago, starting of course with a card kit as a gift, and just went from there. Stamping, stencils and masks are my real passion, and I love creating my own backgrounds and techniques using inks, paints and general messy stuff, I like mixed media too. I'm quite fickle when it comes to techniques, styles and colours, I get bored easily, and so my styles change daily. I've always loved blues and greens, but I love ALL colours really, I favour bright rather than pastel shades.
I'm a relatively new member to the Chocolate Baroque DT (family) and I'm loving it, such an honour to use such wonderful and unique stamps and work with such amazingly talented and dedicated team mates.

Zoe has made a card especially for this post, showing a technique that she enjoys.

She has used:
Butterfly Dreams stamp set
Decadent Brocade stamp set
Mica spray inks in three colours
Rose dies
Silver glitter glue gel
White paint pen
Fine-tipped marker pen

She started by spraying the three colours, letting them run and merge. She scrumpled up a piece of cling film and wrapped up the background, only leaving it for about ten minutes. If you leave it for too long, the cling film will stick to the background. She removed the cling film, and then finished drying the background with a heat tool. This reveals little crinkles of shimmer on top of the colours, it is subtle, but pretty.

Using Versafine Smoky Gray Ink, she stamped the background using the flourish from Butterfly Dreams, and the floral flourish from Decadent Brocade. She heat set the background and added some highlights with a white paint pen.

She cut the die cut shapes, and coloured the top layers of the leaves and roses with the same colour spray mica inks as before, and dried them with the heat tool. She then stamped the beautiful butterfly from the Butterfly Dreams set using Versafine Onyx Black ink. She coloured the image using a turquoise and blue ink.
She stamped the sentiment from the stamp set, added the butterfly using a hot glue gun for added dimension, and glued the leaves and roses into place. She drew the butterfly antennae using a fine-tipped marker pen, and added some silver glitter glue gel to the rose centres and a few extra dots here and there.

Thank you Zoe, it was lovely to hear about you, and to see your lovely project. We would love to know what your favourite colour combinations are, so do leave a comment in the comments section.

We will be back next week with another post, more projects for you to see, and some exciting news ;) Don't forget if you have any questions, and cannot see 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.