Topaz for November

Not only the first challenge of the new month, but also the first challenge of a brand new year for us over on The Daring Cardmakers!

We welcome a new Guest Designer, Saskia, who'll be with us for the next couple of months and also, to celebrate a brand new year we also welcome a brand new full-time member to the DT -   Samm  - who was our October GD is now joining us as a regular member of the Design Team - we're thrilled to bits that she's going to be sharing her fab work on the blog each week.

We're not far from the end of our year-long monthly birthstones theme now.  The birthstone for November is the Topaz and a quick google on t'internet will bring up lots of info about this gorgeous stone, it's colours and the myths and legends surrounding it.  If you thought the Topaz came only in light blue or tawny-yellow - head over to Nat's BLOG as she's added a very handy little photo of the different colours of topaz you can get.

For my card I've stuck with the yellowy Autumn shade of topaz - it's a colour I don't use very often and I think it took longer to actually find some paper of the right colours as it did to make the card.  The list of rejects was long and I was beginning to lose hope till I remembered these BG Indian Summer papers.  Now this might be rather controversial but I've really gone off BG over the last year or so and I'd actually given most of this particular paper pack away (along with quite a few of their other ones), I bought it because I liked the colours but when I actually got my hands on it I found several of the designs "not to my taste" - so I kept the ones i liked and gave the rest away.

I've made a decision to - and you can slap my wrist if you find me going back on it....from now on when a BG collection appeals to me, I'll only buy the 6x6 paper pad - then I can buy the full size sheets of only the designs I really want.

I chose the quotation because of the topaz stone's association with constancy, loyalty, faithfulness and friendship and as it's such a lovely sentiment it deserved to be the main feature of the card.  The flower is made with layers of Primas in differing shades and petal shapes.

Materials:

BG Indian Summer papers, Wide dark yellow organza ribbon, eyelets (for ribbon), 

round gems, square gem, pc generated quotation

The DCM Blog looks absolutely gorgeous this week, so please pop over and have a look - we're hoping you'll be inspired to get creative with the Topaz once you've seen all those lovely cards and variety of shades you have to play with.

I was very good and made 5 Cword cards yesterday - are you impressed?  Okay, it might not sound a lot to some of you but that's not bad in one sitting for me!  I'll be back to show them soon, along with anything else I can find that got missed out in my sniffly blur of the last couple of weeks.

That's all for now, Dear BlogFriend ;-) I hope you'll come and visit again soon