Challenge 24, Week Five

Hello everyone, and welcome to our final week of the current challenge on the Chocolate Baroque Challenge Blog. Thank you for your lovely comments throughout the month, we look forward to reading what you say, and appreciate your support so much.

This week, we are taking a look at some of the entries that we have received for the current challenge, and showcasing a few of them on the blog. We also have a bit of a taster about the next challenge, so be sure to read to the end of the post!

We have had some fabulous entries from you this month, and hope that you have enjoyed using the colours in the current colour swatch. Well done if those colours have taken you outside your comfort zone, and allowed you to create something that you would not normally consider. We hope that you enjoy the selection of projects that we have chosen to share with you.

Partial stamping of one of our clear heart stamps on this card, makes a great design on the three panels.

Penny has created a fabulous sky for her entry:

Kate's soft colouring has created a beautiful backdrop for the musical themed stamps:

Carole has used one of our newest stamps in the gorgeous card:

Shelagh has created a beautiful blended background for the butterfly lady, adding decoupage and acetate for interest:

Thank you ladies for your beautiful entries, they show some fabulous techniques and are very inspirational. Thank you to everyone else who has entered the challenge this month, and we hope to see lots more entries from you before the deadline next week. There is still plenty of time to enter, and you can find a link in this post. If you have any questions regarding the challenges, 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.

Next week sees the start of Challenge Twenty-Five, and our second Anniversary! It seems incredible to think that we have been running for two years, and we have enjoyed the adventure so much. The creative journey, working with the beautiful colour swatches and interacting with you, our viewers, has been a truly rewarding experience. We hope that we have inspired you with our projects, our tips and tutorials, and that you will continue joining us for our weekly spot of colourful fun and crafting as we go into the next year.

Challenge Twenty Five will be a little bit different to the previous challenges, we do not want to spoil the surprise, but we hope that you will join in the fun next month- there will be prizes! The girls have been pulling out the stops to create some extra special projects for you, and we hope that you will pop in to join us with our celebrations.

See you next week!

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.

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.

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:

Carole:

Gerrina:

Shelagh:

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.

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

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