Winners for Challenge #369 - Soft Spring Colours

We're excited to announce the winners of Challenge #369 because the Featured Artist will be our Guest Designer for the next Recipe Challenge on April 24th! Those sweet spring pastels were great to work with and produced some beautiful final results! Check them out!

Here are the winners for this challenge:

Our Top Pick is: Jolanda Johnston

 Jolanda created a charming pastel spring composition containing lots of effects with stencils, textures using 3D embossing folders and die created embellishments. The whole effect is soft and pretty and full of spring! Congrats on winning Top Pick, Jolanda!

Our Featured Artist is: Sonja Zierer

As Featured Artist this week, Sonja will also be invited to be our next Guest Designer! Sonja's beautifully designed tropical holiday scene using the challenge colours features great variety and dimension. The Design Team love the gorgeous tropical flower and foliage on the carefully prepared background. Congratulations, Sonja, you will be our next Guest Designer for our Recipe Challenge in on April 24th. We will be in touch!

                                                      

You might want to visit our Honorable Mentions on their websites:

    5. Smilyn Stef

    7. Christy Stanford

    9.  Ashwini Rao

Join us tomorrow morning for our next challenge, a Fill In the Blank Challenge. Our winners today can pick up their badges on this page and display them with pride on their blogs or sites.   

Winners for Challenge #368 - Floral Sketch Design

We loved the variety of thought and design our sketch brought to the entries for our Floral Sketch Design challenge! We faced the challenge of choosing winners once again.. and we were able to pick winners from among all the beauties entered!

Here they are:

The Top Pick is: Kathy Schweinfurth

Kathy's lovely layered cone flowers made a perfect shape for the main image in the sketch and her trimmed, mixed font sentiment works so well with the double blooms! The Design Team felt that it all adds up to a worthy Top Pick! Congrats, Kathy !

Our Featured Artist is: Teresa S.

Our winning entry, Teresa S., the Featured Artist, has created a gorgeous tropical bouquet with gold highlights! The flowers are all 3D and the accents and sentiment banner are touches of gold. The Design Team loved the gold accents as well as the jewel centers and the subtle floral background! Congratulations on being our Featured Artist,Teresa! 

And we think you may want to check out the following Honorable Mentions on their site:

    6. Christy Stanford

    7. Erin T.

  16. Deb Horst

  17. Suzy Hinton

Join us tomorrow for our next challenge, a Colour Challenge with a chance for the winner to be a guest designer for a challenge! Our winners today can pick up their badges on this page and display them with pride on their blogs or sites.     

Winners for Challenge #348 - Spots or Stripes

We just loved all the entries that came with the Spots or Stripes Theme Challenge! They were all amazing! It was SOO hard to choose winners! To generalize, the spotty ones seemed to be playful and whimsical, while the striped ones tended to be more stately and sophisticated, but there were a few designs that blew that theory completely out of the water! However you slice it though, they were all beautiful!

Here are the winners of Challenge #336! We have two Top Picks:

Our first Top Pick is: Johanna from LHC

The Design Team loved the variety of stripes used on this lovely design of Johanna's this week. There were horizontal, vertical, diagonal, shiny, glittery and solid; this arrangement of stripes created a very sophisticated pattern for a masculine card or any card for that matter! The darker tones used just accentuated the designs. Congratulations,Johanna, on being one of our Top Picks this week. 

Our second Top Pick is: Erin T.

What's interesting about Erin's design is that even though dots usually give off a playful or whimsical vibe, Erin has managed to use them in a way that is decidedly sophisticated. With the black background and yellow dots, that background makes the focal point more on the formal side. We loved that Erin used a vellum circle to create that focal point as well, and along with her colour choices, everything worked together to make a very lovely Top Pick! Congratulations, Erin!

Our Featured Artist is: Milla

Milla didn't just use stripes in her creation today, she made the stripes work to enhance her whole design! The clean, straight lines of the stripes emphasized the clean lines of her florals and the preciseness of her copic colouring skills! The colour matching with the foliage and the stripes enhances the design as well! The stripes are perfectly juxtaposed with the arch of the main panel. Congratulations, Milla, on being Featured Artist  and winner this week!

                     

And we think you may want to check out the following Honourable Mentions on their sites:

10.  Roseanne Mulhern

15.  Bobby

16.  Lisa Elton

18.  Christy Stanford

19.  Sandra Strobel

Congratulations to our winners and thanks to everyone who played along! Come and check out our new Speed Stamping Challenge tomorrow morning on our blog! Our winners today can pick up their badges on this page and display them with pride on their blogs or sites.     

Winners for Challenge #340 - Pesky Resolutions

It was so much fun, and enlightening, too, reading everyone's crafting resolutions for 2025! I have to admit that this was the first time that I'd thought of even making them for the crafting aspect of my business! Some of your resolutions were oh, so familiar, but with great ideas to accomplish them, while some were unique and thought-provoking. And before I get too philosophical, let's get back to the delightful task at hand, which is naming our winners!

Wouldn't you know it? We have a tie for Top Pick:

Our first Top Pick is: Michele Ferguson

Michele's crafty resolution for 2025 is to find workarounds for products she doesn't have instead of having to buy them. She proved this is more than possible when she made this beautiful card with the extra layer ending just short of the top. Instead of buying an edger die, she used a word shadow die and adapted it to make it an edger die, then added the word to it as well. This bold sentiment is accompanied with a beautifully stamped and coloured bird in a budding tree.  So worthy of a Top Pick! Congratulations, Michele!

Our second Top Pick is: LeAnne Pugliese

LeAnn resolved to use more embossing folders in 2025 and she got a good head start by using no fewer than three of them in this vintage beauty. She layered 3 panels of distressed, embossed cardstock just like embroidered ruffles, each layer different from the other 2. By adding the scalloped Crumb Cake edging, the Cherry Cobbler twine and the heart designs, she bumped the whole project up a notch or two. So worthy of a Top Pick! Congratulations, Michele!

 

Our Featured Artist is: Sandra Strobel

Our Featured Artist,Sandra, has created an masculine project in a collage formatl! The Design Team were so thrilled not only the richly coloured paper she chose for the backgrounds, but also the array of cool designs she added - filmstrip, car, gears, among many others. The longer you look, the more things you find, like the edging and the sprinkling of rhinestones. Congratulations, Sandra, amazing work and a great start on your resolution of creating more masculine themed cards!!

                                                      

And we think you may want to check out the following Honorable Mentions on their sites:

 5. Johanna @ LHC

 8. PJ

 9. Tammy Fite

Congratulations to our winners and thanks to everyone who played along! Come and check out our new Recipe Challenge tomorrow morning on our blog! Our winners today can pick up their badges on this page and display them with pride on their blogs or sites.      

Winners for Challenge #329 - Forest Bathing

Thanks to all the guest "chefs" who tried out our Recipe Challenge last week! The beautiful greens in your projects were almost as soothing as Forest Bathing! It's amazing how 5 different ingredients can be combined in so many different ways. Your cards gave us some beautiful designs! Here are the winners:

Our Top Pick is: Jolanda Johnstone

Jolanda used some beautiful patterned paper in shades of green to satisfy that ingredient in our recipe, then stepped it up by embossing that paper with leaves. She added a vertical column and used a different embossing folder for that. The focal point is a medallion of white with lovely tree shapes stamped on in different shades of green and a birthday sentiment, satisfying each element of the recipe when you include the baker's twine around the vertical layer. With the contrast between the green rays and the white medallion, Jolanda has given us a striking composition worthy of Top Pick! 

And our Featured Artist this week:

Our Featured Artist is: Teresa S.

Teresa, our Featured Artist this week and winner, used the elements of the recipe in very creative ways! The Design Team loved her sparkly green palm trees and the embossing she used on the trunks! The many and varied places the shades of green showed up, including the palm fronds and the hammock, as well as the background paper, were interesting and eye-catching.  And look at the clever way Teresa incorporated the twine in her project, as the ties for her green hammock! Wow! Well earned Featured Artist award!  Congratulations, Teresa!

And we think you may want to check out the following Honorable Mentions on their sites:

    2. Johanna @LHC

    3. Erin T.

Congratulations to our winners and thanks to everyone who played along! Come and check out our new Theme Challenge tomorrow morning on our blog! Our winners today can pick up their badges on this page and display them with pride on their blogs or sites.     

Winners for Challenge #314 - Heart Arc

Our sketch challenges aim to give you a framework to enhance your creativity! We love seeing what you do with each element of the sketch and how creatively you fill the requirements of the challenge! This week, we had some lovely designs, with lots of shapes filling in for the hearts in the sketch! From honey pots to lanterns to pretzels, they were all inspired!

Let me introduce you to our winners! Here they are:

Our Top Pick is: Amanda Mertz

Who would have thought, but those juicy little watermelon slices make a perfect shape for the challenge arc! The slices themselves look icy cold and refreshing, while the backgrounds are great colours to show off the main focal point. Check out the actual texture and implied texture in the background and the lovely font and colour of the sentiment! Even the red and white baker's twine bow speaks to the theme! Congratulations, Amanda!

Our Featured Artist is: Jolanda Johnstone

Oh, the woolen texture Jolanda has created as a background for the cozy mittens she has chosen as the shape for her arc in the sketch! And the white panel in the middle helps to continue that knitted panel. The mittens are coloured so precisely, and the colour choice helps to promote that crisp, clear look of Jolanda's project! The white embossed on brown for the sentiment is the perfect look to continue the professional appeal of Jolanda's Featured Artist-worthy card! Congratulations!

                                                  

And we think you may want to check out the following Honorable Mentions on their site:

 4. Jennie Maier

 8. Christy Stanford

14. Yvon Doensen

Congratulations to our winners and thanks to everyone who played along! Come and check out our new Colour Challenge tomorrow morning here on our blog with a chance at winning the right to be our new Guest Designer for our Recipe Challenge in two weeks time! Our winners today can pick up their badges on this page and display them with pride on their blogs or sites.     

Winners for Challenge #250 - Blossom Where You're Planted

It was like living in a Florist's Shop for the past two weeks, with the most beautiful spring flowers all around us! I went and scrolled through all the entries just to enjoy them. So tough to pick winners, and I know my fellow Design Team members agree with me about that, But we did it! And here they are:

Our Top Pick is: Allison Cope

Allison's favourite spring flower, the daffodil, is featured heavily in this stunning bouquet of spring flowers! Her colouring and choice of colours is brilliant and pops against an amazing background of royal blue with a haze of splatters which adds a special extra to her creation! Wow, Allison!

Our Featured Artist is: Julie Gibbs

Jules' masterful colouring job made her favourite bluebells come to life right in the center of the card! She framed them beautifully with the scalloped rectangle and added a panel of texture as well right on the clean white backing, for a total package of wonderful! Thank you, Jules for reminding us of the beauty of this unassuming spring flower with your creation!

                                                      

And we think you may want to check out the following Honorable Mentions on their sites:

1.  Deborah Wheeler

2.  Vicky Hayes

8.   Shawna

11. Leslie Larkin

13. Tenia Nelson

Congratulations to our winners and thanks to everyone who played along! Come and check out our new Recipe Challenge tomorrow morning on our blog and meet our new guest designer! Our winners today can pick up their badges on this page and display them with pride on their blogs or sites.    

Winners for Challenge #142 and a Good-bye Already

Wow! How exciting to see so many of you playing along again! Thank you so much for spreading the word that we are back in action! We loved the level of creativity that this sketch brought out in all of you!

Before we get to our winners this week, we have a sad good-bye to make. Our Design Team member, Amy Ottmers, has had to step down, at least for awhile, and we are certainly sad to see her go, especially so soon after we just got going again, but we wish her all the best and we hope we will be able to enjoy her whimsical designs on our blog again someday soon.

It's getting really hard to choose just two winners! 

But our Top Pick this week is: Jen Mitchell

We liked the soft simplicity of Jen's sweet plaid Valentine card with the complimenting designs on the hearts!

And our Featured Artist is: Joanne James

This elegant, but romantic anniversary card was a hit with the all the design team! We loved the combination of neutrals with the delicate doilies and the shiny satin ribbon. 

Congratulations to both Joanne and Jen! And thanks to everyone who participated!

Be sure to check back here tomorrow for a brand new challenge! We hope you will play along with us!

Winners for Challenge #141

It's so exciting to be back! And it was great to comment on so many familiar blogs and sites again. Thanks for playing with us during the past two weeks. It was lovely to see what you did with Amanda's sketch. From clean to shabby chic, dragonflies to teacups, they were all fantastic and you did such an amazing job with your projects.

But alas, we may only pick 2 winners and so here they are:

Our Top Pick is  LeAnne Pugliese:

The Design Team love the masculine vibe of LeAnne's card with the great textures (especially the background paper), the colours, right down to that awesome sentiment: hb Celebrate!

And our Featured Artist is Jen Mitchell:

The balance and elegance of this card gave the Design Team goose bumps! We loved the pop of colour of the butterfly against the peaceful neutral background. It made the butterfly look so wild and free! Such a beautifully designed card!

Congratulations to our two winners, and thanks to all of you who entered your treasures! I hope you'll check out our new challenge tomorrow and please share it with your crafty friends! Our winners can pick up their badges on this page and sport them proudly on their blogs or sites.