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