Spooky Birthdays & Daring Cardmakers Blog Hop

We're still celebrating the Daring Cardmakers Birthday and this week we have lots of treats to share!

First off the challenge for this week is 'Spooky Birthdays' sponsored by Tando Creative and Imagine That. Your challenge is to create a birthday card with a spooky Halloween theme or if you make Halloween cards you can make a Halloween card instead. I went with the birthday theme and created a spooky birthday card. Muwaha ha ha ha...

Turns out it ended up way difficult to photograph but I guess you can kinda make out the skeleton is dangly in the aperture bit. The spider hanging from the web moves a bit too for extra spookiness!
All the Halloween shapes are chipboard shapes by Tando Creative. The papers are Crate Paper 'Party Day' and the glitter houndstooth is cardstock from American Crafts I used to create the base card. I actually had to cut it up to run it through the Cuttlebug, (it's a 5x7 size card) then stitch it back together again but it did work out that way in the end. The die cuts are Nestabilities pinked circles. I wanted it to look like bite marks or maybe like it was broken through? Most of the chipboard shapes I coloured with permanent black marker then added over some glossy accents and fine black glitter. The skull was covered in silver ink then crystal glitter, skeleton in white ink and a bit of crystal glitter and the pumpkin got embossing powder in a couple of thick layers of white to give it a creepy pumpkin texture then coloured over with a Promarker.

Right onto the extra treat this week, we're having a Daring Cardmakers Blog Hop to pass around some more parcels of gifts kindly donated by our wonderful sponsors! Here's the info from the Daring Cardmakers blog.......

Birthday Blog Hop

To round off our Anniversary Celebration Month we'd love you to join in with a bit of a blog hop.  This is a chance for everyone - even if you don't join in with the challenge - to win one of our birthday "presents"!  

We have some fab prizes to share from 

Crimson Cloud

"Crimsoncloud.co.uk is owned by Linda and Melanie, and is a mother/daughter venture - a way to indulge their joint passion of cardmaking and papercrafting.  Linda, based in South Africa, is the designer - developing their exclusive range of clear acrylic stamps sets which reflect their styles of card making. 

Melanie is based in Brighton, Sussex and runs the web based shop - only selling products that they have tried, tested and love using. New products are regularly being tested and added to the range. 

Crimson Cloud have plenty of card samples to give you inspiration - you can check out the gallery on the Crimson Cloud website, follow their boards on Pinterest, click onto their Facebook page or simply follow their blog on www.blog.crimsoncloud.co.uk. New posts and samples are added at least once a week."

and this is the prize from Crimson Cloud - this gorgeous Christmas stamp set:

Charmed Cards and Craft 

(£10 shopping voucher plus three digi bundles of your choice - a non UK winner must take the whole prize in digi downloads) 

Funky Hand

(3 vouchers worth £15 each)

 

Back to me for this bit! You need to comment on the Daring Cardmakers design team posts on their blogs, (on the one for this weeks challenge) then hop back over to the Daring Cardmakers Blog to add a final comment once you've done. The more you comment the more chances of winning a prize you get! The links to each designers blog is above their card in the challenge post for this week so click on those and get commenting. I've also popped a list here for you if you've ended up here from another Daring Cardmakers blog ;-)

Guest Designers:

Lou Daubney

Julie Kirk

 

The usual suspects:

Nat

Sharon

Svenja

Miri

Kathy

Lythan

Beckie

 

Have fun a hopping!

x Leo

Daring Cardmakers Birthday Celebrations - Docrafts sponsored dare

Hi!

All this month over on Daring Cardmakers we're celebrating the 7th birthday of the blog. There are prizes up for grabs and we've got some fab sponsors sharing their products too so you get to have a nosy at some of the great cardmaking products out there as well as the design team showing you some ideas on how to use them. As it's a party we've also got some guest designers popping up so keep a peek on the blog all through October and make sure you get involved because you've got the added incentive of prizes too!

This first weeks dare has been sponsored by Docrafts and they kindly provided the design team with some of their Border Punch punches to use. I was sent out the Ribbon Bow Border Punch and the Poinsettia Border Punch. Both you can get from Docrafts direct and from Docrafts stockists of which there are plenty so it should be easy to find one local to you. I know my local garden centre and The Range stock all the Docrafts products so they're really easy to get a hold of and the punches are a great investment buy at just a fiver!

I had a good play with the punches and I did have a little go at seeing what I could punch out with them. I even tried out punching Washi tape. I stuck the tape to a clear card bag first, (something that you can peel the tape off of afterwards) then punched along the tape. It worked quite well although I did need to make sure there were no sticky bits getting stuck inside so if you do have a go at this make sure you do the same so your punch isn't getting jammed with sticky bits. Makes for a bit of a different look to the tape. I'd use this on scrapbooking projects too.

 

Getting back to the challenge this week, as it's the birthday celebration we're making all the challenges birthday themed and the challenge this week is to be inspired by the rainbow birthday cakes and make a birthday themed card. Here's what I came up with for the birthday card using the Docrafts Ribbon Bow Border Punch:

 

I created the bunting from scraps of cardstock and measured the length of the bow cut out to get the pieces the right size so I could punch a ribbon out of the top of each piece. I then punched out holes in the top corners of each piece and strung each together using bakers twine. I used 3D foam pads to adhere the bunting to the card blank to give it the feeling of movement. The finishing touch was just adding the stamped greeting across the top. I wanted to keep it simple and just let the rainbow colours show off and the detail of the bow punch to be the focus so it didn't need any extra embellishing.

 

As an extra challenge this week you can also make a Christmas card using similar ideas/style to your first card. Here's what I came up with:

Again I've kept it simple to make the punch outs the focus. I used the Poinsettia border punch to punch out the edge of the card as it makes a lovely decorative edge. I think you could use this for any lace looking edge too. The banner was made cutting out squares of paper then punching the bows from the edges and stringing them together as in the first card but with this one I glued down the first and last pieces of bunting first then arranged the others around it so the middle piece is at the top.

Don't forget to check out this weeks challenge and have a go, www.daringcardmakers.blogspot.com
You can win some of these fab border punches from Docrafts and also a £10 voucher from Ribbon Girl!

x Leo