My Fave Colour

I'm going to be popping over to the DCM Blog often this week just to look at the array of cards made with the turquoise/aqua shades that are my favourite colour - it all looks sooooo pretty!

The challenge this week is the next in our birthstone series and the birthstone for March is 

Aquamarine

Looking around the web to find out more about the gem I found some interesting info

*It's also the gemstone for the 19th Wedding Anniversary (something to look forward too....;-) )

*The properties associated with aquamarines are

Faithfulness, courage, friendship, awareness, quick response and easing communication problems

*This gemstone is often used as a charm by sailors for protection while at sea.

Plenty of  ideas for cards there,, eh?  

I've a couple of commissioned Mother's Day cards to make and I thought this dare was the perfect opportunity to make one of them - 

As I've added the new March sketch to my other blog The Sketch File I thought I'd use it for my card this week

Although the card I've made is pretty simple, you wouldn't believe how much of a hassle it was to make!  Do you ever get one of those days when you're decidedly "off-par" and find that every single thing needs at least two attempts to get right?  That was me yesterday!

The coiled flowers are made from Lokta paper.  The colours of the ready dyed turquoise pieces I have were too dark for what I wanted so I thought I'd use some white and spray ink it to a shade I liked.  Let's just say it took all morning just to do that bit.  Then I had to get the iron out to dry the now very soggy paper.

The 4 scalloped layers panel were a trial - I now have a little pile of mismatching strops.

The bow refused to tie nicely, and when the bow was right, the position was wrong.

I made the holes too far apart for the bead string so had to add more beads.

Then I used foam pads that were too thick and the sentiment piece was higher at the right end than the left, so I had to persuade them off and just use some chipboard instead.

I realised halfway through making them that the flowers I wanted to make would be far too large to fit three of them along the top of the sentiment

So, change of plan and went for coiled flowers instead and at last things started to get better. Once everything was in place I added some tiny brads to the white space top right and finished it off by adding a tiny amount of Stickles to the flowers - then stopped while the going was good!

I'm really looking forward to seeing lots and lots of lovely aquamarine cards this week so I hope you'll be joining in!

I forgot to mention earlier in the week that there's a new challenge over on the Get Funky blog.  For March the theme is "Girls, Girls, Girls" and we're asking you to make something nice and girly this month.

There's a great prize on offer - but, please read the rules - to enter you must use some Funky Hand products - you would not believe the number of people who don't bother with that bit and therefore disqualify their lovely projects.

For some reason I seem to be making a lot of little boxes lately and here's another one!  I've used the fab "Dreams Come True" cd to print the papers for my box.

 There are four different papers from the same collection on this mini pizza box and yet more of those coiled paper flowers. I highlighted some of the dots on the paper designs with a few blobs of matching Stickles shades.

Right, that all for now. I'm off to start on the next thing on the to-do list - and I'm hoping that today things work first time!

Thanks for looking