Challenges from the Christian Paper Crafts website

I went exploring last week and found myself an interesting new craft group called Christian Paper Crafts. There used to be a paper magazine associated with it, but it seems that that has been discontinued (not surprising given the immense amount of time and money it takes to create on, and how little return people get on it in this economic climate. I used to know a couple who published a science fiction magazine in Australia, and it was a nightmare of a job!) Anyway, there's no magazine to see right now, so the front page of the site says 'page not found' but ignore that and click on the Community or the Galleries. They're both going strong. They have a different challenge each day of the week except Sunday, they post really thoughtful bible commentaries and studies regularly, and their design team are magnificent, so there's plenty of inspiration to be had! I've started tackling some of their challenges and here are the cards I've made for them this week.

 Monday's challenge is a colour-combination, so that's fairly easy to do. This weeks' challenge was 'Old pretty blue' - old olive, bashful blue, and pretty pink.I found that one extremely easy thanks to the spring paper I have in my stash. The little hearts sheet from Joanns Spring stack is the perfect pink/green colour combination and I just had to add the blue. I used a piece of cardstock from the spring glitter stack for that, and I punched it into lace with a border punch. It needed a bit more punch (not literally) so I nested it on a narrow strip of dove blue cardstock, which really isn't as bright as it came out in the scan, and I was done.

Tuesday's Challenge is a sketch... ST26 I used a sheet from a little pad of inspiratonal messages I got at the Dollar Tree, and I trimmed the message out with my colluzzle. The sheet had a flowered border on the bottom and I turned that into the little dangly decoration. The other element in the page sketch was a pair of stripes at the base of the card, so I used some scrap cardstock to make a band. The green stamped band is a Studio G stamp and I had it sitting in my scrap box waiting to be used, and the stamping underneath it is from Scrappy Cat. This card is very simple and I'm not entirely happy with it...

 On Wednesday the board has a different kind of challenge which doesn't involve making a card, so I'll skip to Thursday. John was working last night so I had nothing better to do than to sit at my desk and play, and instead of making one card for the challenge I made three, all with the same verse but different designs. These cards were made for Bible Verse Challenge 27, and I'm very happy with all of them. The challenge was to use Fall colours on your card and to incorporate a bible verse to do with the seasons... I didn't want to use the same verse as the cards that were posted before me (the obvious one is Ecclesiastes 3:1 To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under the heaven' and it was used first!) I was really racking my brain to try and come up with a suitable quote to use myself, and I found my salvation on a site called Mybiblescripture.com They have a search engine that lets you rummage through the entire King James bible to find verses under any key word you wish, and it came up with 82 references to season... needless to say I had to read through a LOT of verses but I found one that was an appropriate sentiment for a card in the end.

This first card uses Joanns acrylic stamps for a border... I cut the quote out with my colluzzle and mounted it on a strip of scrap cardstock, and then I decided that the card could use a little ink to help blend the colours together. The stamp in the middle didn't quite work, so I covered it with some punched flowers as a distraction.

I let my fiskars border punch do all the work on this card. I trimmed the sentiment down to a narrow strip, and punched some scrap cardstock into a mounting strip... then I cut a wider strip and made a nesting border and the card really didn't need anything else done to it! Sorry the scan is blurry - the brads are 3D and my scanner only likes flat things. The leaf stamp was from a discount store in Australia...

This last card is a larger-format than the first two. I decided to do a collage and the punched leaf strip was too wide to fit onto a small card so I moved up a size. The verse was trimmed out with my colluzzle and the attribution didn't fit onto the shape so I put it a bit further down the card by itself. I finished the collage with scrap paper, a few leafy stickers and a gold sentiment.

I won't usually be posting so many challenges in one go, but I need to get into the habit of doing blog entries!