Challenge Twenty-Five, Week Four

Hello everyone, and welcome to the final week of our Anniversary Challenge on the Chocolate Baroque Challenge Blog. Thank you for your visits and lovely comments throughout the month. Your best wishes have really been appreciated, and we hope that you will continue to follow along with us as we head into our third year of colourful challenges and creative fun. 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. Remember, there is a bumper prize of a £25 voucher on offer this month, all the more reason to get creative and enter the challenge! You can add your entry to the link in this post.

This week, we are taking a look at the entries that we have received for the current challenge, and showcasing them on the blog. We have not received so many entries this month, perhaps the different format threw some of you a bit, as you are so used to our colour swatches. Don't worry, we will be back to normal next month! Anyway, we have decided that because we love chocolate so much, that we are going to show all of the entries that we have received so far, it was too difficult to decide which ones to leave out.

Kate has created a chocolate orange inspired card, using the Tangled Birch stamp:

Shelagh has chosen a chocolate honeycomb theme for her hexagonal easel card:

Jan has created a super card using all sorts of chocolate flavours, and the added texture looks like chocolate chips-delicious!

Dotstolines have created a chocolate box covered in handmade chocolate embellishments that look good enough to eat:

Joan's rich chocolate coloured tag, complete with chocolate cupcake, and sparkly cherry, is a delicious addition to the challenge entries:

Janny has chosen to use the strawberry and caramel colours in the chocolate photo from our anniversary post, she has mixed dark and white chocolate elements to complete the design:

Gerrina's card combines some fabulous textures; cork and hessian for the leaves, which are very unusual. The CAS design is super, with a lovely sentiment, and a scattering of dragonflies in the background.

This month, we are introducing you to Magda, one of our newest Design Team members.

Hallo ladies, I am Magda and I live in Italy. I have been on the Chocolate Baroque Design Team since April 2016. I have been using Chocolate Baroque stamps since 2013, and used to sell them when I ran my own craft business.

For many years before I had a craft business, I dedicated myself to different hobbies until I started to look at Art History with my Son and Daughter, to modify the drawings, and to be scolded by the Professor who recognised my 'paw' every time. It was fun for me to discover the use of colour and at the same time, materials and techniques that I did not know.

Then one day, by chance, came the turning point...It was near to 1990, with our children, we were visiting Parma Cathedral. At the time, they had just finished the interior restoration of the dome. For a few days, you could walk on the scaffolding up, up, up, a few metres from the Correggio frescoes to admire the work of the recently concluded resoration.

At that precise moment, I found myself so wrapped up in the dome, among the paintings, that I could almost touch them, to see so closely all the different nuances, the vibrant colours of the frescoes, appreciate the enormous size of the figures, the endless details. To be near you, from the bottom, creating the illusion of heaven and earth and of infinite perspective. That indescribable thrill!!

The result was so inevitable; I started my journey of artistic training, courses in drawing and painting, composition, colour, form study, study of styles and art history....This path, although started more than twenty years ago, not yet completed! Knowledge of languages, travels in Italy and abroad, and the people that I have had the pleasure to meet during my explorations, have helped me to develop my own way, influencing my thinking and expanding the knowledge of my techniques... and to open the business.

Now I am playing with blue, yellow, red, green, purple, violet, orange; I am fond of all of the colours and their combinations, as well as Mixed Media, but I don't like repetitive work. I have fun in creating the basis on which to continue various techniques. This leads to ever changing results that may be similar in colour combinations, but never the same in form and composition.

I hope that you enjoy knowing something about me, and I will be very pleased to hear from you and see your artwork, Magda.

Magda has created a super project especially for the Anniversary Challenge; a chocolate box, complete with three 'bars' of chocolate inside, one of each flavour. They look good enough to eat. She has used an Art Nouveau style flower from the Nouveau Lovebirds stamp set as her central motif.

Thank you Magda, for your lovely project, and it was great, getting to know you too!

Sadly, we did not hear from the winner of our Design Team prize a few weeks ago, and so we have redrawn a winner, using Random.org. The new winner is Janice Stone. Congratulations, Janice, your prize will be on its way to you as soon as possible.

We will be back next wee with a brand new challenge, but hope to see lots more chocolate themed entries for our 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.