5 years a-growin’

Yes, it’s been a whole 5 years since Cards and Stamps addicts appeared on our computer screens, five years that I have followed the life of the forum from near and far, without quite taking the plunge and participating actively on the forum.  Until now, that is, for last month the moderator team organized a fabulous birthday challenge, too tempting to resist.

It saw me teaming up with the lovely Josie, Darshiva, Pascale and Florette, for a whole month of challenges.  Five-times-five challenges to be exact, with each of our lovely moderators adding their own criteria to each challenge.  Huge thanks to Natalia, Créacam, Mimi, Irène and Karilou for all your behind-the-scenes work preparing everything, and for guiding us through the more challenging elements of the game.  You were models of patience with us poor scrappers, despite our incessant questions and diverse difficulties!!!

Our first task was coming up with a name for our team, but not any name at all, it had to be linked with the number 5 in some fashion.  After scratching of heads and mulling things over between us, my teammates and I finally decided to become “les Scrappeusement CINQlés” (scrappily mad, I think that just about sums us up nicely), and decorated ourselves with a colourful, summery avatar:

Proudly bedecked in our lovely team banner, we eagerly awaited the 5th of the month to discover our first challenge, then set-to with a will as soon as it appeared.  The challenge consisted of mixing two sketches to make one card, using a minimum of five elements between the two sketches.  I was to tackle the two sketches Mimi had concocted for us, and this is the card I came up with:

However, being a glutton for punishment I did not stop there, oh no!  I went on to complete another of the challenges, my personal favourite of the whole competition.  This is the lovely mixed-media card that I put together in a flash, using Irène’s two sketches, they totally inspired me!

The second challenge was much more difficult for me, a colour combination.  I had a gorgeous selection of pastel tones to use, chosen by karilou: light and dark grey, blush pink, baby blue, turquoise, green …  I used them to make a romantic little card:

The third challenge was in many ways the easiest, but not quite as easy as it first appeared.  A simple cardlift was all that was required … however we had to respect rigorously the style of the original card and the techniques used.  No cheating with ready-made solutions for a mixed-media background, for example.  I had the fun of working from Natalia’s proposition, and got it wrong the first two attempts.  I used a patterned paper for the background first, but had to redo it with an inked one.  However, there wasn’t much difference in the final outcome:

I really liked the colour-scheme of both these cards, and was pleased with the result, however they didn’t meet the criteria of the challenge, so I started over and made a similar-but-different version:

As I love cardlifts I then had fun lifting the other moderator’s choices.  I couldn’t resiste lifting Créacam’s card as I had just come back from my friend Sophiedenc’s, where she had kindly let me borrow some of her dies.  I was itching to use the floral die cut of hers, which was perfect for this challenge.

Then I used another of her dies to cut some gorgeous butterflies, which were perfect for lifting the card proposed by Irène:

And I used the same butterfly on my lift of Karilou’s card:

The competition was not finished yet!  For our fourth challenge each of the moderators concocted a list of five elements which we needed to include on our card.  This time around I had to work with Créacam’s challenge, not an easy task for me as Créacam is a big fan of shabby and vintage, a style which I admire but rarely use.  I didn’t want to take the “easy” route by using lots of pink, beige and flowers, so I spent quite a while choosing my papers.  I ended up using a collection by Authentique, red, blue, white … not the usual vintage-y colours, but by inking them carefully the card came together quite well.

The five elements I had to include were: 5 flowers, layering, a swirl, a five-word sentiment and some medical gauze.  In the end it was the five-word sentiment which gave me the most difficulty, and once again my friend Sophiedenc’s die cut came to the rescue for my swirl:

Still with me?  Only one more challenge to go … the most difficult of all, in my opinion, and indeed the one where my resulting card didn’t really appeal much to me.  This time we needed to use a picture chosen by one of the moderators as inspiration and reproduce at least five elements of the picture in our card.

The inspiration for my card was the following image, chosen by Irène:

I had lots of choice for elements to use, and went for the following list:

A nautical spirit, small splashes of yellow colour, the sentiment on a panel like the sign in the photo, a film strip to represent the ladder, an imitation wood background, two different sized hearts for the two different sized baskets, some twine for the lamp cord and a colour sheme which corresponds to that of the picture: grey, white, petrol-blue, small touches of yellow.

Here’s my card:

After all that scrappy-fun I packed away  papers and glue and headed off to Dublin for a few days to recover.  Now that I’m back my fingers are itching to get started on this months projects!