27th Oct - Pinterest

We've got a Pinterest challenge for you today, I found this lovely pin to inspire you!

Masquerade by Amber Olsen

Anastasia
As soon as I saw the photo, I knew I wanted to do something with feathers. When I need some more inspiration about a specific word, I usually look for quotes. So I found the quote "Birds of the same feather flock together" and thought of my crafty friends that I got to know in the last three years and knew what my theme would be about:

I die cut feathers on vellum paper and wrote the names with white pen:

And combined wood veneers with feathers:

The journaling says: "Scrapbooking has been only the start for the formation of a great team and the establishment of many good friendships!"

Anna

I really love the pin photo and used lots of bits from it to inspire my layout. I use the purple, I water coloured it on the background of my layout, the sequins, the gold swirls and feathers, I made my own paper feathers! It all went well with a photo of my best hanging basket this year as it was in my favourite colours and looked great too!

Cari

I won this Psy mask on a county fair and as fast as I took this picture I knew I was going to use it for this challenge! I also got inspiration from the colors of the picture: blue, purple, brown and gold. For the tittle I wrote " Oppa Gangnam Style" The song isnt' that popular now, but I still love it.

I use papers of the Atlantic collection from Studio Cálico and some letter wood venners.

Hilde

I was inspired by the feathers on the mask, and I had the colors in mind, too, when I designed this layout With a bird theme:

We have two super cute budgies at home, but who knew such tiny creatures could such an amount of feathers?

In fact, I often use real feathers from the birds if I make a layout about them, but this time I din't have any on hand, so I used a large one from Bella Blvd. 

Bird trim, fabric bird, journaling cards with a bird on, bird chipboards, wings chipboard - birds are all over in the scrapping industry.

Jinny
I was drawn to the feathers in the inspiration photo.  So, I hunted my photo stash for any pics of birds.  Honestly, I was pleasantly surprised by how many I found, but in the end, I decided to go with pics of one of my family's trips to the zoo, focusing in on the pancake breakfast we had, where all the proceeds went to help bring penguins to our zoo, as well as on my kiddos and hubby feeding the lorikeets.

Most of the goodies you see here came right from this month's JBS Papercrafting Kit, which was thoroughly inspired by Basic Grey's Persimmon Collection.

And I brought in a couple of bird elements, as well as these fabulous, feather die cuts to reinforce my theme.

Katherine

I went a little bit laterally with the inspiration for this page....I started with a chevron mask and some texture paste, and then a little of the gold in the form of sequins.  I tried to make my page rich in colour and texture like the masks with lots of detail and layers too.

Petra

I must start with telling you I really do not like purple. Nevertheless, I am always up for a challenge so I decided to get inspired by the mask, the gold, the feathers and the color purple. 

 My page is made in different layers. I started with a purple PP from FabScraps Angelic Christmas on which I placed a slightly smaller waster color paper. I placed it a bit skew and stitched it on. I then added some stencils from Crafter's workshop and a lot of different stamps I made using this month’s sponsor Teresa Collins Stampmaker fromPhotocentric. 

Next I cut out two photos and some PP slightly bigger than the photos. I creased the PP in my hand and then distressed the edges with Dusty Concord distress ink before I smoothed them out again and added beneath my photos. The Chipboard is from FabScraps and I altered them first with gold ink and then with gold embossing powder before I distressed the edges with Black Sooth distress ink.

I fuzzy-cut a cage and birds from The FabScraps PP and added a purple feather. I also punched a purple stripe from the PP but I made it more like the colors of the photo using Picked Raspberry distress

 And last I mounted everything.

Rachael

The first thing that inspired me was the colors purple & blue, I thought what a great color combo... Also! was inspired by the gold glitter swirls which I added some gold glitter to the tips of the Fern Leaves chipboard!!

Stephanie
When I saw the photo of the mask, I immediately thought of a similar photograph I had taken while in Las Vegas. I knew I wanted to layout to reflect the glitz and glam of Vegas, but I didn't want to it appear too thematic. So, instead of grabbing all the Vegas-inspired papers and embellishments I have in my stash, I decided to work with more generic products.

I used a circle placemat by Jillibean Soup as a starting point and filled in the circles with patterned papers by Glitz Designs and Amy Tangerine. The gold doily on the right is from the new Maggie Holmes collection and the textured grey cardboard at the bottom is actually from an old nail polish box. 

I finished things off with some feathers, enamel dots and sequins. 

Guest Designer - Sue

As soon as I saw the gorgeous photo inspiration for this challenge I knew exactly which photo I was going to use - Sophia dressed in her glittery dress; I love the way the sequins reflect on her cheek. I don't do glitter and bling very often and rarely scrap with purple so this prompt took me way out of my comfort zone - which is good now and again! I used a hexagon punch and outlined some of the shapes with bling. I don't think I've ever used silver foil card on a page before but it looks OK, doesn't it? I love the Studio Crafts little wooden shapes and they feature on most of my pages at the moment. I blinged them with Stickles for this page.

It amazing all the different inspiration that comes for one image, isn't it?! They are all so different!

This month's sponsor at The Studio Challenges is Teresa Collins Stampmaker.

Manufactured by Photocentrics whom also manufactures clear stamps.

The Stampmaker is the perfect tool if you like to design your own stamps.

One lucky winner will get one set of stamps (size A6) of their own design. You could make one single size A6 stamp or several smaller that fits in that size.

The Stampmaker tool is available all over the world. You can find it at Hobby Craft.

You can also order your own clear stamps at Photocentrics.

Don't forget you can find us on Pinterest too! You will find all our DT layouts and sketches to pin! 

Get creating and link up your layouts to the side bar you have until 10th November.

September's Winner

It is time to pick a winner for September's Challenges, we had some brilliant layouts this month, thank you to everyone that entered!

First we would like to show a few layouts that really caught our eye:

Mandysea

Marianne Ehlen

Puccarina

And the winner is ...................

Smile_art

Smile_art please contact Anna at thestudiochallenges@gmail.com, you will be our guest designer for a month!

13th Oct- Monochromatic

Time for another challenge! For the first time we are joined by our new design team members so you will be extra inspiration from now on!

Today's challenge is to create a monochromatic layout.
For those of you that need a little help with the word, 'Monochromatic' means using different shades and hues of a single colour!

Here are the design teams takes, we have all tried to pick different colours so you can see how each colour works:

Anastasia
As soon as I heard about the monochromatic challenge, I knew I wanted to use pink and I wanted to scrap myself... which is rather strange, since pink has never been one of my favourite colours, thus the theme of the layout as well.

I managed this time to stick to pink and white, without using any black

Even the journaling is printed in pink fond on vellum paper

...And yes, that's me on the photo, when I was about four years old :)

Anna

I went with green as my colour. I really enjoyed creating this as I just pulled out some green papers and embellishments and got creating, it cut the choice down of all the other lovely colours! The greens went well with this photo I took in Spain of a lovely view.

Cari

This might be the first time I make a monocromatich layout and the first time I use purple! I just can say I loves the final resul It was so easy to choose papers that I should do monocromatich more often. I use just two papers! The one for the background from American Crafts and a purple page from the basics collection from Pebbles.

I also use some purple embellishment from my stash.

Just love this little lego like's brads. I have them for more than three years and it's the first time I used them!

Daphne

The colour RED normally is not really MY personal choice when selecting paper for a new layout. So having been 'assigned' to scrap a monochromatic layout in RED - it really was a challenge for me!

I started going through my basket of scraps and picked all the reds I got! Wow - I have lots! But how to use all of them? Easy! I punched several shapes and started layering. I also added some red and white paper straws I stumbled over on our last shopping trip.

Luckily I had an instagram picture in black and white from my husband, while waiting for the coach to arrive to get us to Heathrow airport.

Hilde

My youngest kid is a creative one, in many ways. He wanted to test out if the loan mower could be used to pull him on his long board:

Title: The optimist

To create a true monochromatic layout, I inked all white parts on the patterned papers with yellow ink.
Photoshop + me = not friends. I printed my photo in b/w and simply used a yellow marker on the parts I wanted to be colored. Easy peasy :-)

PS. This didn't work out as DS planned. The combo of long grass and small wheels, was a bad one. This made have worked on a smother surface, though :-)

Jinny
Monochromatic looks have never been my strong suit, but I knew that I wanted to try to rock one with sonogram pics of our new baby.  So, as soon as we found out he was a boy, I dove into my blue stash and put together this number.

Some precious, little images, from Graphic 45, add just the right amount of vintage...

and lots of inking, stamping, and layering create depth and add interest.

Katherine

My colour was orange, and it made me realise how many different paper companies use a very similar orange colour with their papers - there is MME, October Afternoon, Studio Calico, Simple Stories, Jillibean soup all on this page.  I balanced the orange with some neutral browns and creams, and a few splatters of orange mist too.

Rachael

 I had this photo of a friend & ME which I have been wanting to scrap....

 I know straight away which color I was going to work with.... BLUE!

Stephanie

 I chose to work with brown for this monochromatic challenge because I knew I had a lot of woodgrain and cork in my stash of supplies. Earth tones like brown are perfect for autumn layouts, and nothing says autumn quite like a Pumpkin Spice Latte from Starbucks! 

Brown can quickly create a solemn look, so I knew I wanted to combine patterns to give my layout a more festive, celebratory feel. I paired the woodgrain paper by Maggie Holmes with a fun polka dot pattern from Amy Tangerine's new Cut & Paste collection. 

Petra

Teal or turquoise are my absolute favourite color. We even have a turquoise sofa in our house. I had to manipulate the photo a bit in photoshop to get the teal feeling into a more blue face paint but I think it came out OK. 

I used a mask from Heidi swapp to make the butterflies and then I sewed on them to add some texture and detail.

On this page I used a chipboard from A2Z Scraplets which I stamped on and then sprayed with dylusions mist. One of the flowers are from Prima and the rest I made myself using flat flowers from You Do.

I used slightly different shades of teal to get some dynamics in the page and combined with white to get contrasts.

The title is stickers combined with a cut out using the Silhouette.

Guest Designer - Sue

I can't resist scrapping photos of my great-niece and nephew and here they are all snuggly in their jim jams. I love to use black and a splash of colour for my pages, it really makes them pop. I'm on a mission to use up some of the mountain of stash I have and this paper is an old one from the Fancy Pants Glimmer range called Summer Soiree. When it was all stuck down I could see the page needed more texture than just the distressed edges so I added some hand stitching, a button, some ric rac and the little black stars which were skulking on my desk. I've gone with the current trend for chevrons and used a strip of Washi tape, too.

This month's sponsor at The Studio Challenges is Teresa Collins Stampmaker.

Manufactured by Photocentrics whom also manufactures clear stamps.

The Stampmaker is the perfect tool if you like to design your own stamps.

One lucky winner will get one set of stamps (size A6) of their own design. You could make one single size A6 stamp or several smaller that fits in that size.

The Stampmaker tool is available all over the world. You can find it at Hobby Craft.

You can also order your own clear stamps at Photocentrics.

Please link up your layouts to the side bar, which monochromatic colour will you pick?!