Our First Challenge - Inspired by the Paris Olympics 2024!

Hello everyone and welcome to our new challenge blog.  I love to get creative and I know our customers do too, so we've set up this new blog to host a monthly challenge where we will set a paper craft challenge each month to spark your creativity - we may even offer prizes to the best projects if we get enough people playing along!

For our first challenge which will run until the end of August 2024 we've selected a "be inspired by" theme.  I often see some random object, or something on TV that sparks a creative idea for a card so I love an inspired by challenge.  This week I was inspired by a costume at the olympics so I've decided this month's theme will be "be inspired by Paris 2024 Olympics"

You can take this theme in many different ways - be inspired by a specific sport, by an eye-catching moment from the opening ceremony, colours in the team kits, shapes and colours in the arenas, a specific location like the Palace of Versailles, the mascot, or even take shapes to create a layout - like the symmetry from synchronised diving, or the fact that the medals have a bit of the Eiffel Tower in them - hide something unexpected on your card to represent that.   

There is a WHOLE HOST of things to be inspired by.   I've done a little screenshot of ideas below - but you can pick anything you like - just make sure you make it clear in your post what inspired you.

I was inspired by the gymnasts' costumes - they were all so pretty and sparkly so appealed to the magpie in me - so I've gone with the USA team and used this photo as my inspiration.

Hopefully it's pretty clear how I used that to inspire my card - I've just used strips of navy and red card with some extra sparkle from my favourite Pixie Dust card to match the sparklly outfit.  Once I'd layed down all the card strips I added some stars using Lawn Fawn's really useful Star Border Die cut from silver glitter paper. Finished with a Sentiment from an old MFT set which is great for inspirational cards - this one will be an exam pass card I think.    (You can find the products I used - and more - in our store https://sevenhillscrafts.co.uk/)

Here's some more inspiration for a second week of the challenge - this time I've taken my cues from the banners around the stadiums - the colour blends are delightful!

I used Distress Oxides to blend a panel on my base card and added some faded dots with a stencil over the top.  I used the same blend of colours for the Waffle Flower Postage Collage Snowman Stencil - and hey presto - the Olympics inspires Christmas cards too!

 

OK - so now it's over to you - we're going to run this inspiration challenge for the whole of August so you've got plenty of time to make something and link it up below so we get a gallery of inspiration.  We've asked for an email so if we decide to offer a prize (depending on participation numbers) then it's easy for us to contact you to to send it! 

To add your link just click the tool and paste the URL of where your image is located (or upload it from your computer) and complete the form.  Simples!

Happy Crafting!

Tara