Challenge Inspiration

It’s time for the monthly Sweethearts Global Collective Blog Hop and I want to share what I did last month! At the end of February, I hosted an International Creative Retreat with fellow Stampin’ Up! Demonstrators from Canada and Australia. As a prelude to the actual retreat, we held weekly challenges to inspire participants to try new techniques and showcase their talent. It always amazes me how you can give a group of stampers the same tools or parameters and get such different results. It’s a wonderful thing to see the beautiful creations they made.

For our retreat we had three challenges, a color challenge, a sketch challange, and a use your scraps challenge. The entries were diverse and beautiful.  Here are my entries for the challenges

Challenge 1 – Color Challenge

For this challenge, I listed five Stampin’ Up! colors: Basic Black, Coastal Cabana, Flirty Flamingo, Granny Apple Green, and Mango Melody (Basic White/Very Vanilla were free to use). Stampers had to use three of the five in their creation. It was so fun to see the different color combinations everyone used for their designs. The project were all really beautiful and unique.  Here’s the card I made for this challenge.

I used Coastal Cabana, Granny Apple Green, and Mango Melody ink refills to create a unique striped background using the baby wipe technique. I did a quick video using this techique on my Crafty Klock YouTube Channel.

Challenge 2 – Sketch Challenge

Sketches are a great jumping off point. You can use the same one over and over and get a totally different look simply by changing what you use. Here’s the sketch posted for this challenge and the card I created using this sketch

How did I do?  The beauty of a sketch challenge is you can make it exactly like the sketch, change the orientation, or just pull certain elements from the sketch to create with.  Here I stayed pretty close to the origial sketch but I did put my focal point slightly off center,

Challenge 3 – Use your Scraps Challenge

This was an interesting challenge in that we could only use a half sheet of cardstock for the card base.  The rest of the elements had to come from scraps of other papers we had on hand.  When using 6″ x 6″ pieces of Designer Series paper, I always  have odd pieces left over.  I used these pieces with a small die shape to create my card for this challenge.  I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

Bonus Challenge

Over the course of a week, we used polls to ask participants to select elements for us to create with.  There were four polls and we asked them to select the type of stamp set we should use (floral/non-floral), the color family (regals, brights, subtles), ribbon (ribbon, twine, linen thread), and embellishments (gems/sequins, wink of stella. no embellishments).  The winning selections were floral stampset, regals color family, linen thread, and gems/sequins.  Here’s the card I made for that challenge:

It’s a mini slim line card with a matching Designer Series Paper envelope.  You can see how I made this card from my YouTube video

Time to Hop!

Thanks so much for stopping by my blog today.  I hope you enjoyed reading about the challenges and seeing what I made for each one.  Before you hop away, I’d like to invite you to join my email list so you can stay up to date on all the happening at Stampin wtih Crafty Klock.  Just click here

Time to hop to the next blog.  Happy Stamping!

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