elite stampers march challenge

well i have been a good girl and done yet another challenge set by the amazing carol for the elite stampers group. it has given me a good chance to use colours i would not normally touch with a barge pole and use stamps i have but never use. the first challenge i did was a colour challenge of "Wild Orchid Nights" using Wild Wasabi, Orchid Opulence, and Night of Navy. As i only have the wild wasabi ink pad i was encouraged to dust off my chalks and use them to get the colours i needed for the challenge. so i chalked up the leaves and petals in mainly the challenge colours but also added some other colours to give the flower some depth. then i went over the chalks with my water pen and finished them off with some soft subtles markers and dazzling diamond. then i cut out various peices and stuck them up/down (who knows really?) to make them sticky-outy (is that even a real word lol?. I put them onto night of navy car but it looked boring so wondered what i could do to make it look good without distracting from the big pretty flower....hmm...some pondering took place i can tell you. then i thought i would try some so swirly on vellum.I versamarked with so swirly and tried that...nah too borign! i added some heat and stick powder to the versamark, heated it and then added the dazzling diamonds and....oooooooooo...pretty! The next challenge i tried was to use the stamp set bodacious bouquet. now i do not possess this stamp set but i had a few samples snaffled during the inklings team weekend away. so i thought why not use them to do something. i also have a fixation (as you have seen on previous posts) for little notebooks so rather than do a card i would use the bodacous bouquet to play on a notebook. so i punched out the various elements i had and stuck them together. i put in some extra holes and followed up with yet more dazzling diamonds (reminder to self: take out shares in dazzling diamonds factory). then i added a tab on the side and some fibre and ribbon snaffled from my ribbon box to top it all off . The last challenge i did was a sketch challenge which was really cool to do. i altered it a bit but have kept to the original idea i think. i wanted to go monochromatic as much as possible and i also wanted to use up scraps i had lurking in my scrap pile. i had my so swirly wheel still out from the colour challenge so i rolled that in some stazon onto the gloss white card. then i took my illuminated wheel and rolled that in versamark, added some silver embossing powder and heated it all to make the super dooper swirley back ground. i wanted some more silver but didn't have any card. so i versamarked a strip of scrap card, added silver embossing powder and heat gunned that to make a silver strip of card that kind of looked like ribbon. the next thing i did was find a butterfly image i had staz-oned (i think a touch of nature stamp set?) from an inkling gathering onto vellum. i added some glu-stik to that and squashed it onto some dazzling diamonds. then i let it dry as flat as I could with some blu-tak holding it down as vellum tends to curl when damp. then i put the whole lot together with soem black card, vellum and a punched out black circle and some brads. i was really pleased with how this came out. i like it when the card in your head matches the card that you make :> okies better go and do some mummy stuff lol cheers ears There exists no politician in India daring enough to attempt to explain to the masses that cows can be eaten.. ~Indira Gandhi~