Taheerah Atchia

Hey everyone!

Happy Monday! I know, I know, Mondays are tough. We all need a little tonic to help us get through the day. Luckily there’s a new challenge in town to help us do just that – the Cure For The Monday Blues Challenge!!

This is a challenge which I’ve created myself, yay me! Every Monday I will bring you a photo inspiration challenge, with images that focus on lifting us out of those Monday doldrums and all inspired to create!! I’ll be asking you to play along as well and linking up your creations! At the end of each week I’ll pick a Top 3 who’ll be my Cures For The Monday Blues and receive a special badge to add to your blog!!

This challenge is really going from strength to strength now – woo hoo!! Thank you to everyone who has given it love and support and helped it to grow – especially the weeks where you’ve been patient with me while I’ve extended the challenges!

In case you missed this previous post, please read on for some of the recent changes made to the Challenge – including info on how to be in with a chance of becoming a Guest Designer!

Right then. Back to business, lol!

Before we get to this week’s challenge I want to once again thank all of you that submitted entries for the last challenge. I am always especially happy to see some new faces to the Challenge, as well as ‘regulars’! They were all truly beautiful entries and you did not make my life easy when choosing the winners!! I really wanted to pick you all!! Here are my Top 3 Cures For The Monday Blues:

Houses Built of Cards
Lisa’s Creative Niche
Thordis

Winners please contact me to be sent your challenge winner’s badges!

***Pure Cure Winner!!***

As you know, this month I have the absolute honour of the challenge being sponsored by Winnie & Walter, and that means I have an overall winner to announce! The winner receives a $30 gift certificate to Winnie & Walter!! I’m delighted to announce that this week’s Pure Cure is… 

Lisa’s Creative Niche!!!

Huge congrats Lisa!!! Please Contact Me with your e-mail address to claim your prize!!

To my Top 3 Cures: you girls have no idea how much I agonised over picking just one of you as a winner! I wish I could have picked you all! Seriously outstanding work!!

Yet again I had some absolute stunners for entries. It is seriously getting harder and harder each week to pick out only a Top 3! All of you have really been putting in some amazing designs and it makes me so happy when you play, so please keep playing along!

As I mentioned in my last blog post, each challenge this month is very kindly being sponsored by Winnie & Walter – which means that there’s a prize up for grabs! I’ll give more details at the end of this post! 🙂

One final thing before we get underway! I’ve finally created a badge for the challenge for anyone who wishes to add it to their blog, you’d make me so happy! I’ve included it on my blog sidebar along with the code you need to use it, so it couldn’t be simpler! And just in case you’d like to see it here, here’s what it looks like!

Fun right?! I’d love to see some of you grab it and use it!!

So are you excited to get this week’s challenge under way?! Let’s see what’s up for this week’s inspiration:

Source: Pinterest 

Such a wonderful mix of patterns, bright colours and white! There’s even a touch of neon in there and some of my favourite colours – gold, pink and mint!!

Here’s what I came up with: 

I love how this turned out! I haven’t played with ikat for *ages* so I was getting a little antsy!! 

I started with a panel of Pure White cardstock and stamped the zig zag ikat pattern from WPlus9’s Backgrounds And Borders 1 set. I used a mix of A:Muse ink in Papaya and SU! ink in Daffodil Delight for my yellow. I then used the solid oval stamp from the set and filled in each circle one at a time using A:Muse ink in Bubblegum. The oval stamp is actually a row of several ovals, so I inked up just one of them so I could control the positioning better. I also used the small centre shape to remove the ink by kissing against the oval 3 times to create a gap! Is this a new technique?! I certainly haven’t seen kissing used for this purpose before! It’s more like sucking than kissing, lol! I actually did an entire A2 panel full of this pattern, then cut it down to fit the card. So I have some yummy pattern left over to use another time. 🙂 

I then die cut the sentiment from Shimmer Gold cardstock and Shimmer Pink cardstock using the Quad Love die. I die cut from gold twice, leaving the bottom edge off the final love, and then trimmed the bottom of my Shimmer Pink piece to fit the gaps, so fun! The gold wasn’t gold enough for me so I used my Tarnished Brass Distress Paint Dauber to colour it! I adhered the die cut pieces to the base die-cut using Multi Matte Medium then adhered to my panel using the same, before adhering my panel to my base to complete the card!

But wait, there’s more!! As Winnie & Walter are sponsoring this month’s challenge, I invited their DT girls to play along!! This week I have the immense pleasure of having Vanessa Menhorn as my guest! Here’s the amazing card Vanessa created: 

I love how she created a shaker featuring the blush-coloured circle! And look at all those fun sequins, perfectly chosen to match the colours from the inspiration!!

Make sure you head over to Vanessa’s blog for more details on how she put this card together!!

So now it’s your turn to cure the Monday Blues! Here’s how to participate in the challenge!

The Rules

• Create a brand new project using the photo inspiration
• Post on your blog or to an online photo album. Ensure you link up to this challenge post in your blog post and include the inspiration photo
• If it is not obvious how the image inspired you then please explain your process in your post
• Link up your creations to this post using the Inlinkz below. Please use the link to your actual post rather than the link to your blog
• You can enter as many times as you like!
• The deadline for linking submissions is Sunday 25th January at 11pm GMT/6pm EST

As I mentioned, every challenge this month is being sponsored by the super-generous Winnie & Walter! I’ll be giving a $30 gift card away to one winner from every challenge! I’ll be picking one top winner from my Top 3 Cures, and most likely there’ll be more entries throughout this month there being the chance of a prize *wink*, so really do create your best work to increase your chances of winning! Remember you can enter each challenge as many times as you like!

So are you ready to play?! I can’t wait to see your creations!!

PS: if you would like to check out all of the previous challenge images you can see them here on my Pinterest board! 

Supplies