January Craft & Connect Challenge - Rainbows!
Happy New Year to all of our lovely followers. We hope that you’ve all had a wonderful December, however that was spent in your home, and that you’re feeling optimistic and energised for a new year.
If you follow our stories on Instagram you will have seen that we asked for your suggestions for January’s challenge theme - you all overwhelmingly voted for Rainbows / Brights to kick off 2025 with some vibrance and positivity!
Our wonderful friend, and amazingly talented cardmaker, Lisa Tilson, will be popping in later in the month with a dose of rainbow inspiration for you, but in the meantime, here’s a little card that I made with my four year old daughter, Charlotte, to give to her school buddy, Phoebe. Our school has a lovely buddy scheme that pairs up Reception kids with a Year 6 student, to help them through their first year in school.
We die-cut the name “Phoebe” from a slimline card panel, using Altenew’s Bold Alphabet dies, and stamped out some of the chameleons from Clearly Besotted’s Colour Chameleon stamp set (still one of my favourite stamp sets!). Charlotte coloured the chameloens with pencils and then helped me to ink blend a second slimline panel with distress oxides in rainbow colours. We decided to turn our card into a shaker, so we glued a panel of acetate on to the reverse of the front card panel, added double height foam tape around the edges, then added in some rainbow coloured shaker filling. After removing the release paper we added the ink blended panel on top (rainbow side down) to seal in the filling, then glued on our chameleons to the front of the card. We placed on a pre-printed sub-sentiment, then added the whole thing to a slimline card base.
I love how easy but impressive shaker cards are, and adding rainbow colour to the inside of a shaker window is a really easy way to introduce colour, if you’re not sure where to start.
This month’s challenge
We’ll be using InLinkz for our challenge entries this month, so that you can see all of the amazing entries in one place, and follow some of the crafters participating, if you like their creations!
It’s super easy to use - just go to the following page, and link up your challenge entry by adding the link to your social media, blog, or other location where your project can be found:
https://fresh.inlinkz.com/party/9113683eff0544148d26d771bb962e04?visitor
So, over to you - you have until 5pm (UK time) on Friday 31st January 2025 to submit your challenge project. Here are all the rules:
- Create a card, scrapbook layout or other handmade project in line with this month's challenge theme: “Rainbow / Bright“;
- Submit your entry to via InLinkz - see above;
- You can use any brands you love;
- Enter the challenge by adding your project above, but please feel free to share it on social media, too, and use the hashtag #craftandconnectchallenge - don’t forget to tag us, @craftandconnect_uk too, so that we can find it!
- Each month, the challenge will be open from the date the challenge is posted until 5pm (UK time) on the final day of the month;
- Winners will be picked at random, and will have the opportunity to guest design for a future challenge;
- Winners will receive a prize, detailed in that month’s challenge blog.
The prize for the winner of January’s challenge will win a £20 gift card to the Craft & Connect store, which can be redeemed against our courses and other upcoming products.
Good luck, and happy crafting!