Hello there!  I’m excited to be the challenge hostess at CAS Colours and Sketches during the month of April!  I hope you’ll join in the fun and creativity of our color and sketch challenges.

We have a soft, light trio of springtime colors for you to work with this week.  I couldn’t resist doing something floral with them.  I decided to try something I hadn’t done before – coloring a die cut image and mounting it over a stenciled background.  It wasn’t difficult to do, but I’m not sure I really like how it turned out.  This is actually my second attempt at the stenciling; the first turned out too dark and the die cut didn’t show off against it very well.  The second time I trimmed the tape holding the stencil in place to give it an irregular edge, which looks more natural.  Overall I don’t think it’s one of my better cards, but it’ll do.

Be sure to check out what the rest of the CC&S Design Team has made! Then create your own clean and simple styled card with these colors and link it to the CC&S site by 6:00 p.m. Eastern time Monday, April 13. We’d love to see what you make!

Supplies:
Stamp: Delightful Dozen (Stampin’ Up)
Cardstock: Solar White (Neenah)
Ink: Sahara Sand, Smoky Slate (SU)
Other: Wildflowers #1 die, Slate layering stencil (Tim Holtz); markers (Copic)

Hello there!  We’re getting into the holiday spirit at CAS Colours & Sketches this week and closing out the year with a festive challenge.  This week we’d like for you to choose one of our challenges from 2019 and make a seasonal card with it.  You can pick from our color challenges, our sketch challenges, or our double challenges.  Or, if you want to kick things up a notch, you could combine one of our sketch challenges with one of our color challenges and come up with your own double challenge!

The card I’ve made combines two of our recent challenges.  I actually had this idea in mind for sketch challenge #347, but wasn’t able to pull it all together before that challenge went live.  I’ve turned the sketch on its side and used the colors from challenge #350 to create a holiday card.  The glittery gold star didn’t seem like enough gold at first and I was very tempted to add some brads as ornaments on the tree.  But I decided to keep things simple and leave them off.

Which of our CC&S challenges from 2019 will you use?  You can check all of them out on the CAS Colours & Sketches blog using the tabs below our blog header.  Be sure to see what the rest of the design team has made, too!  Then link your card to the challenge site by 6:00 p.m. Eastern time Monday, December 16.  We’d love to see what you come up with!  Thanks for stopping by today.

Supplies:
Stamps: Season of Joy, More Merry Messages (Stampin’ Up)
Cardstock: Solar White (Neenah); Cherry Cobbler (SU)
Ink: Cherry Cobbler, Emerald Envy, Chocolate Chip (SU)
Other: diamond nesting die (Dies Direct); gold star brad (Recollections)

Hello hello!  At CAS Colours & Sketches, we’re celebrating our challenge blog’s 7th birthday this week with challenge #350!  To thank our challenge participants for helping us to reach this milestone, some of our CC&S Design Team members are offering up prizes from stamp companies Concord & 9th, My Favorite Things, Picket Fence Studios, Unity Stamp Company, and Waffle Flower to five lucky players in this week’s challenge.  You won’t want to miss out on this event!  All the details are at the challenge site.

Our challenge this week features some festive colors.  To be honest, I chose them with the thought that it would be easy for the team and our participants to use them for holiday cards.  If you check out the design team’s cards, you’ll see that’s exactly what happened!  🙂  For my card, I used a die to cut star-shaped ornaments from cardstock in the three challenge colors.  The die I chose created lots of little parts, which made it easy to make multiple cards using the frames from the gold stars and the little pieces of deep red and green to fill in the design.  Some of the pieces were pretty tiny so I opted not to fill those back in.  I think the white left there provides some nice contrast and adds to the clean and simple look.  It doesn’t really show in the photo, but I used shimmery white cardstock for the focal panel and the card base, which gives the card a nice hint of sparkle in real life.  A gold die-cut sentiment finishes off the card.

A big hug of appreciation goes out to all of my CC&S Design Team members and our challenge participants for making our blog such a wonderful gathering place for fun and creativity!  The rest of the team and I would love to see what you can create with this week’s colors, and to have you join in celebrating with us!  Share your card at the CC&S website by 6:00 p.m. Eastern time Monday, December 9.  We hope you’ll continue to join in our challenges!  Thanks for stopping by here today.

Supplies:
Cardstock: Shimmery White, Gold Foil, Cherry Cobbler, Garden Green (Stampin’ Up)
Dies: Crystal Ornaments (Poppystamps); Word Set 3 – Holiday (Karen Burniston)

Hello there!  It’s color challenge week again at CAS Colours & Sketches.  I’m looking forward to seeing what our challenge participants create with it!

I have to confess that it took me a while to figure out how I wanted to use these colors.  That’s partly because I don’t own two of them and knew I’d have to make substitutes for them.  Then when it finally got to crunch time, I had about 3 ideas pop up in my head all about the same time.  I decided to go with the one that seemed quickest to make.

My initial thought with the tree was to cut the trunk and branches from the brownish color in the challenge trio, but when I was gathering my cardstock together, I thought it would look too orange-y for tree bark.  I opted to go with a true brown for that instead, and use the challenge color for leaves.  That’s where I ran into another small problem.  When I bought this set of dies, I wasn’t thinking about it being a winter themed set, which meant there were no leaf dies included in it.  However, there are several bird dies in it.  I decided I’d just cut a number of birds in the orangey and yellow challenge colors and trim off the heads and tails and that would look like leaves.  It was kinda fiddly work, but I think it turned out all right, if you overlook the fact that my leaves are nearly the same size as the one bird I cut from the blueish color.  I did have the silly thought that my dreams may now become haunted by decapitated birds…  Let’s just hope not.   Even with the blue bird and the blue sentiment, I felt like there wasn’t quite enough of that color represented on my card, so before I adhered everything down, I splattered a bit of the blueish ink near the top of the card.  I haven’t decided if the splatters are supposed to be raindrops, or just specks of color.

Be sure to check out what the rest of the design team has made.  Then link your own card at the challenge site by 6:00 p.m. Eastern time Monday, September 23.  Thanks for stopping by today!

Supplies:
Stamps: none
Cardstock: Pure Luxury Ivory (Gina K. Designs); Chocolate Chip, Dusty Durango, Island Indigo, So Saffron (Stampin’ Up)
Ink: Island Indigo (SU)
Other: Winter Trees dies (Penny Black)