Friendly Challenge.

I hope your weekend is fabulous so far, with plenty of good things to do and great people to do them with.

My weekend started on Friday with a day out to see my dear friend Helen and to share the challenge layouts we had done.

We have a new system of deciding what our next challenge will be, it used to be whatever we could think of  that we hadn't done before. But I gave out six envelopes each recently and we put a challenge into every one, sealed them up and now we just get someone to pick an envelope for us each time we need a new challenge.

This time around we had one of Helen's envelopes and the challenge inside said

'Using punches and dies only, create a page. Any medium can be used and any embellishment'.

As it was Helen's challenge I will share her page first.

Her adorable page features a pet rat of one of her daughters. 

As you can probably tell from the title she had curly whiskers! Not a usual thing for rats to have but she looks so cute with them.

Helen has totally rocked the challenge with nearly all the elements of her page being die cut! 

She created the background with paint and cut hexagon's for the main design of her layout.

These butterflies were cut from balsa wood and the black bead embellies look so much like the rats eyes!

The beads and doily are the embellishments Helen added that were not die cut, but this cute banner is and the heart strip that disappears under the photo. 

Well done Helen for a great job of sticking so well to the rules.

This is my interpretation of Helen's challenge but I failed slightly by mounting one of  my photo's on a piece of pattern paper that I cut with my trimmer!!!! (Luckily Helen forgave me and we are still friends!).

Anyway these photo's of my eldest daughter (who loves to take selfies) were taken at Colchester Zoo and feature a large bronze lion statue that I think she fell in love with! Perhaps she kissed him to see if he would turn into her prince (because who would want to kiss a frog?). 

The title 'Kiss Me Quick' is the name of a song sung by Elvis Presley back in the 60's and I thought it suited the photo's.

The rosette flower was cut with a Tim Holtz die and the white leaves, flower and banner were also cut from various die's although I'm not sure of the manufacturers. 

These rectangles under my title are really old Sizzix dies as I promised myself to use some dies that I don't remember using before! I love the effect though so they will probably get another airing at some point.

There we have it, another friendly challenge that was fun to play along with as always. We hope you enjoyed seeing our interpretations, we have a sketch to follow for our next one which will hopefully be in a few weeks.  

Thanks for stopping by today. xx