Friday, July 10, 2009

Hello Dolly

For the last few years Irina, from Chernobyl, Russia has been coming to stay for a few weeks with Rein's family in Germany. In her honour, Rein's challenge to The Daring Cardmakers this week is to make cards with a Russian theme, or design element inspired by things Russian.

The team have been doing much Googling, I can tell you!

At first I thought of making a Nesting Dolls card which would all fold concertina style with dolls and "pages" of decreasing size. Then I thought I could be really brave and get the inks out and have a go at making some sort of tryptych affair. I quickly rejected this one as asking for trouble! Of the messy disaster kind!

Back to Googling.
I found a clip art of some lovely Babushka dolls and thought they'd be fairly easy to make into Robo Templates, and I decided on a 3 rows of 3 dolls design


It was a good job I actually cut several extra bits because as you can see there are more than 9 dolls on my card. Rows of three looked silly so I filled the whole card up instead. The dolls are tiny, only 4cms high so some of the bits are quite small. The base layer is the same for all the dolls, but I then made two designs for the "clothes", which I could then alter slightly later with scissors to add to the number of designs.
I used about four double-sided papers and cut several of each element from each paper - which gave me the choice of using either side of each to make the dolls. That was the easy bit!

I knew that the hardest bit would be the faces, so I decided to cut down the amount of drawing I had to do by making lots of different hairstyles to cut on the Robo - now if my dolls were only 4cm high you can imagine how tiny the hair bits were! But still much easier than drawing in the hair!
I can't draw for toffee but the faces are tiny so as long as you don't look too closely its ok - I still feel though that most of my faces look like little boys faces instead of little girl ones. Hey ho, nothing I can do about that! lol lol
I must admit, I rather like a dare which sets me a real challenge (occasionally - not every time - just in case any of the rest of the team are reading this - don't want to give them ideas that might make my life too difficult hehehe), and this one did just that. But, you know, I'm really really pleased at how this turned out and although a bit fiddly I really enjoyed making this card.

So, if you fancy a real challenge take a look at Rein's fab dare and see if you can give your cards a bit of Russian flair this week. You can see the rest of the DT's cards HERE. Looking forward to seeing what the Darers come up with over the next week.

Back tomorrow with the first of my DT cards for the latest set of Crafty Templates, so please come back soon

16 comments:

Anonymous said...

oooo this is SOOO adorable Kathy - a wonderful idea beautifully crafted!

Kaz said...

Oh my Kathy!! There's such a lot of work gone into this card. I bet you had no time to be P-ing ha ha!!

It's lovely and you deserve a brownie point for your efforts!

Karen said...

WOW...this is amazing Kathy!!! All that hard work was certainly worth the results. My Russian friend Nadja would love this!!! XXX

Lythan said...

What an absolutely adorable card. I'm guessing it is not the quickest make ever but was well worth it. ONe of the best cards EVER!

Rika said...

Love your card Kathy!

Angelnorth said...

I think Kaz is being a bit mean with the Brownie points there, at only 4cm high and with hand drawn faces I think you might deserve a point per doll! Super-cute card Kathy, fab idea and nicely executed!

Saskia said...

WOW!!!!! Gorgeous card!!!!!

Saskia :)

Traceyr said...

Great idea Kathy. What a brilliant looking card too. :)

CLARE said...

Brilliant job there Kathy, they are so colourful & bright. Quite a difficult theme this week eh.

Janice said...

You don't half make things difficult for yourself Kathy lol. Lovely result though.

Anonymous said...

Love it Kathy, you've really put Mr Robo to work! :)

Vanessa.

Caroline said...

Fanastic card Kathy!
I love the russian dolls and their faces are so cute, haha...x

SueH said...

All those little dolls……..and all those flowers!
What a great card Kathy, so colourful and fun.

Sue
x

Enfys said...

I really love this Kathy, would you believe that I never thought of googling, I love what you did with the little dolls, and their faces look cute
hugs
En x

Jo said...

This is so cool, must have taken age though? Well worth the time (and the faces are brill too!)

ps the word verication was a norty word (made me chuckle)

Elizabeth Golden said...

This is fabulous! Love the repeat yet not repeated. just wonderful.