Wednesday 29 June 2016

Challenge 24, Week Three

Hello everyone, and welcome to another week on the Chocolate Baroque Challenge Blog. We hope that you are enjoying the current challenge colours and the wonderful inspiration provided by the Design Team. For those of you visiting the blog for the first time, here are the inspirational photo and colour swatch that we are using for the current challenge:

You can find a link to the current challenge here.

This week, we have more inspiration from the Design Team. Asha's beautiful inky scene contains a lovely message:
Magda has created a wonderful woodland fairy scene for her project:
Anne's vibrant seaside scene is perfectly contained in her porthole shaped card:
I have created a set of Christmas notelets, along the same lines of my earlier floral cards for a previous colour challenge:


I have created a tutorial for you, showing you how to create these cards, which can be adapted to use any colours or stamps that you like.

Materials:

Distress Inkpads: Squeezed Lemonade, Ripe Persimmon, Wilted Violet
Archival Plum inkpad
Versafine Onyx Black inkpad
Smooth Watercolour paper
Cream linen card
Selection of Christmas stamps and sentiments


Instructions:

Cut six strips of watercolour paper 5.5cms wide and 10.5cms long.
Colour each strip with a mixture of the three colours of Distress Ink, blending them where they meet. Spritz the panels with water if desired and dry with a heat gun.
Stamp the images using Plum Archival ink, and add the sentiments using Versafine Onyx Black ink.
To make the cards, cut two pieces of A4 linen card into three, approxinately 9.8 cms wide.
Fold the strips in half, at the 10.5cms point, scoring the fold to give a neat crease. Round the four corners of the card if desired.
Adhere the coloured panels to the linen cards.

For extra Christmas sparkle, you could choose to use gold embossing and add a bit of glitter to areas of the stamped images. These cards will be great for batch cards if you have lots of cards to make.


Thank you so much girls for your projects this week. We hope that you will be inspired by something that we have shown you, and will join in the challenge yourselves. We will be back next week with another post, and some more projects for you. If you have any questions, and cannot find the answers on the blog pages, please send us a private message using the contacts form located at the very end of this post; you will see it after the comments section.









Wednesday 22 June 2016

Challenge 24, Week Two- Winner's Week

Hello everyone, and welcome to another week on the Chocolate Baroque Challenge Blog. This week, we are announcing the winner of Challenge Twenty-Three. The winner of our £15 prize to spend at Chocolate Baroque is Kate, whose project was drawn by Random.org as the overall winner. Congratulations Kate, we hope that you enjoy your prize.

Please email Lesley on lesley@chocolatebaroque.com so that she can organise your voucher. You can also display our Winner's badge on your blog, details of how to obtain the badge can be found on the FAQ tab at the top of the page.

The Top Three this month have been chosen by our Design Team, who have had a tough choice, owing to the fabulous entries that we have received. The Top Three in no particular order are:


Congratulations ladies, you can display the Top Three badge on your blog. Details of how to obtain the badge can be found on the FAQ tab at the top of this page. Well done to everyone who entered, and we hope that you will enter our current challenge. You can find the details here.

We have some more Design Team inspiration to share with you this week:

Vronnie has created a lovely card using Brushos for the background, adding one of our current Baroque stamps of the month:
Claire has created a very atmospheric seaside scene:
Zoe's card uses subtle background stamping and added details like the little dragonfly:

Magda's clean and simple card incorporates a fabulous sentiment with a bold flower for maximum impact:
We hope that our projects will inspire you to create something yourselves and join in with the current challenge.

We will be back next week with another post and more projects from the Design Team, but until then, we look forward to seeing your entries. 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.




Wednesday 15 June 2016

Challenge Twenty Four

Hello everyone, and welcome to a brand new challenge on the Chocolate Baroque Challenge Blog. Thank you for your support throughout the month, we really appreciate your visits to the blog, and love reading your lovely comments. We will be announcing the winner of Challenge Twenty-Three next week, so if you entered the challenge last month, please be sure to check the announcement to see if you are the winner of our prize.

As a reminder to those of you who have visited our blog before, and for anyone who is new to the blog, our challenges are monthly, based on an inspirational photo and a colour swatch. A new challenge is launched on the third Wednesday of every month. You can use any medium to create your project; inks, paints, pens, pencils, etc., as long as you stick to the colours from the colour swatch in your project. We are offering a monthly prize of £15 to spend on Chocolate Baroque stamps to one lucky winner, who will be selected by Random.org from all of the entrants who have used Chocolate Baroque stamps currently available from the website. We welcome entries incorporating other stamps and images, but they will not be eligible for the prize. All entries will have the chance to be selected as one of our Top Three, and can then display our 'I made the Top Three at Chocolate Baroque' badge on their blog.

We have a fabulous new colour palette for you to use this month, and some beautiful inspiration from the Design Team, which we will be sharing with you over the next few weeks. Here is the colour swatch for the new challenge:
The challenge will close at 12.00 p.m. on Tuesday 19th July 2016, and the winner will be announced on Wednesday 27th July 2016. Here are some projects for your inspiration from the Design Team:

Anne's project incorporates some of the Punky Flowers against a vibrant background, and an inspirational sentiment:
 Julie has used one of the individual cling mounted stamps, Ophelia, and created a sunray effect background to surround the image, adding glitter for some shimmer.
 Vronnie's Brusho backgrounds, and black matting create a very dramatic feel to her card:
I have created a card using images from a paisley stamp set to create a butterfly, with a stencilled background.

Thank you so much girls for your inspiration using the new challenge colours. We hope that they will encourage you to create something yourselves, using your own crafting materials, and join in with the challenge. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact our challenge blog team. You can get in touch by sending a private message. Details are at the end of this blog post below the comments section.

We hope that you enjoy the new challenge, and look forward to seeing your projects, Judith xx


Wednesday 8 June 2016

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.




Wednesday 1 June 2016

Challenge 23, Week Three

Hello everyone, and welcome to another week on the Chocolate Baroque Challenge Blog. We hope that you are enjoying the current challenge colours, and the fabulous inspiration provided by the Design Team. For those of you visiting the blog for the first time, here is the inspirational photo and colour swatch that we are using for the current challenge:

You can find a link to the current challenge here.

This week, we have more inspiration from the Design Team. Magda has made a pretty peacock themed card, creating her own embellishments to match:
Anne has created a beautiful woodland scene using some of the Design a Tree stamp sets.
She has very kindly written a tutorial so that you can have a go at making her stunning card yourself:

Anne writes " I am loving the Colour Challenge this month - just my colours. I created this as one of my TV samples for the recent show on the Craft Channel with the Design-a-Tree sets. Wasn't Lesley brilliant!"

Materials:

Stamp sets: Design a Tree Arboretum Glade, Orchard, Landscape Edges, Words of Inspiration,
6" x 6" card blank, white stamping card, and holographic mirror card for mounting
Inkpads: Versafine- (Vintage Sepia, Onyx Black), Distress Ink (Dusty Concord)
Pebeo Drawing Gum masking fluid
Brushos: Leaf Green, Turquoise, Ultamarine, Purple
Clear mica spray
Alcohol marker (black), fine-tipped pen (black)
Stickles glitter glue (Diamond)


Step by Step:

Trim the stamping card to approx 14cms square (slightly smaller than the card blank).
Stamp the trees in Vintage Sepia and the sentiment and birds in Onyx Black Ink.
Draw a circle in the sky and apply masking fluid.
Prepare Brushos for painting by addng crystals to a little water in a palette. Paint the picture with the inks.
Remove the masking fluid and drag some of the colour across the moon.
Spray the moon and central area of the painting sparingly with a little mica spray.
Add a little shading to the trees with the fine-tipped marker, extending at the roots to anchor the trees.
Edge the card with black marker and blend Distress Ink in from the Edges.
Mount onto the mirror card and glue to the card blank. Finish with a little glitter glue for moonlight sparkle on the branches.


Zoe has made a lovely card using Pan Pastels.
She has also written a tutorial, enabling you to try out her amazing card for yourself:

Materials:

Linen card
Nesting Stitched Rectangle Dies
Pan Pastels- Turquoise Shade, Violet Tint, Violet, Permanent Green, Dairylide Yellow
Cheap hairspray
Pencil eraser
Nesting circles stencil set
Stamp sets: Sketchy Doodle Landscape, See Beauty
Silver glitter pen
Tuxedo Black Archival inkpad

Step by Step:

I started by cutting three sizes of linen textured card using my nesting dies, my base card is also made from the same card. I love linen card for CAS cards and especially when using Pan Pastels, I love the sharpness of the overall finish, and I think that it adds a touch of class!
Using my nesting circle stencils, TIP: you could use die cuts for the same effect, I just laid my colours down using Pan Pastel sponges. TIP: it is important to use the proper tools and sponges, as the cheaper make-up sponges are far more absorbent, they soak up the pigment and do not lay down the colour as vibrantly as the denser, proper sponges and tools. This means that you waste more of the product.
As you can see, I have gone outside the circles too, to add a bit more depth. TIP: I mixed the Permanent Green and Dairylide Yellow inside the stencil to obtain a more citrus green, as I did not have the exact colour.
When using multiple colours and stencils, it is important to use a soft brush to remove any loose powder from the card, and to wipe the stencil between using different colours. I also find that Pan Pastels pick up any grease from the card, and so I lean on a piece of scrap paper so that my fingers do not leave greasy marks.
Once I was happy with my coloured circles, I stamped my image and sentiment using the Archival inkpad. Once the ink was dry, I carefully used an eraser and removed colour from the petals of the flower. TIP: remove colour before sealing the card with hairspray. I then added a few little dots in some of the petals using a silver glitter pen.
I stamped the butterfly on a separate piece of linen card and lightly coloured it with the Pan Pastels and decoupaged it onto the card, after I had assembled my card. I used a foam double-sided tape between the layers of my card to add some dimension.

Thank you so much girls for your cards and tutorials this week. We hope that you will be inspred by these projects, and will join in the challenge yourselves. We will be back next week with another post, and some more projects for you. 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.