Teenage Kicks

It's the first of July, those of us in the may be forgiven for thinking it's October given the weather, but it is still the heart of summer supposedly, and now it's time for a new challenge at St Luke's so if the sun isn't shining on you we have something to keep you occupied...

This month we are looking for cards for teenagers.  It's time to swerve the cute and dig out images with a little "edge" and make something funky and modern for those difficult teenage years.  For boys or girls - the choice is yours - just be sure to channel your inner "Kevin"!!!

We have another fabulous prize for you again this month - the lovely ladies at Ribbon Girl have kindly donated a £10 gift voucher so you can have a little shopping spree and top up on their wonderful stash!   Click the voucher image below to see what they sell if you're not familiar with them.

If you're struggling to think of an idea then our DT have a whole host of eye candy for you this month - check out our inspiration parade and don't forget to click the names to link to our blogs for details of how we made our cards.

Anne

Deborah

Jenny - for a boy

 and again for a girl

Lynne

Sylvie

Tara

Did you find your Kevin yet???  (for those of you not in the UK, or who didn't watch it, this is a reference to a character that Harry Enfield the comedian used to play on TV - he went upstairs aged 12 a nice friendly boy and came down on his 13th birthday a miserable, bad tempered teenager!)   I hope that inspires you to join our challenge - our numbers have been a little low this summer - so I wanted to remind you that you don't HAVE to send your card to play along - by playing and publicising the challenge you're still doing "your bit" to help us so please join us if you have the time.  We look forward to seeing all your fun and funky entries.

June Winners

Time to announce the winners of our last challenge - we may only have had a few entries, but we had some gorgeous ones!

Our favourite card last month, and therefore the overall prize winner of the lovely Waltzingmouse Stamps was Louise - No 15 with this gorgeous little row of bunnies in flower pots.  Definately fury and definately cute - we really loved how you popped one of the bunnies up to add a little dimension Louise. 

Our three runners up this month all had great fury creatures featured on their cards with great colouring and strong eye catching designs - your winners badges will be winging their way through cyberspace shortly ladies - so congratualtions to Val, Di and Laura.

You've still got 3 weeks to play along in our new teenage kicks challenge for a chance of another great prize - this month it's a £10 ribbon girl voucher so do get your mojo flowing and join us.  We award prizez on merit by a whole DT vote not a random draw so do give us your best work if you want to win ;-)

Our Little Furry Friends

Hello everyone and welcome to June and a nice long weekend in the UK to celebrate the Queen's Diamond Jubilee - there are a number of challenges out there to reflect this asking for red, white and blue or something regal so we thought we'd be different and get you to make cards featuring furry animals instead!  It can be any theme you like and can have as many layers as you like for those of you who found last months one layer too daunting!   All we ask is that it features something furry - dogs, cats, monkeys, mice, teddies or even furry monsters if the mood takes you ;-)

This month we have another fantastic set of Waltzingmouse Stamps worth £14.99 up for grabs - the fabulous and extremely useful set of wordy background stamps Text-It  Click the stamp set to link to the store and see all the fabulous projects the DT have created with it.

So are you ready for our inspiration parade (see parades are not just for her Majesty we can all join in!)  We've got a wide variety of furries to inspire you this month:

Anne

Deborah - she likes the theme so made two ;-)

Jenny

Lynne

Sylvie

Tara

Hope that got your mojo flowing as we'd really like to improve on last months low entries - so please tell all your crafty buddies about our challenge :-)

Today's Fair

Just a little heads up in case anyone was planning on coming to see us - I have pulled out of the Heeley Festival today due to the inclement weather - I'm afraid I just couldn't stand another 10 hours of battling the wind and rain in an open field.

Sorry to disappoint - am looking for some INDOOR fairs as we speak.........

A little fury reminder.....

Just to let you know that you still have 9 days left to play along with our "something fury" challenge this month to be in with the chance of winning the lovely Waltzingmouse Stamp Set worth £15. 

If you need a little more inspiration - here are a few cards from the DT

Deborah

Sylvia

Tara

It's also Jenny's birthday today so if you've time - pop on over and pay her a birthday visit.

Quick Update

It's been a pretty long, pretty wet and very windy weekend - so sorry if you've been waiting for an update on yesterday's fair.  I'm afraid there wasn't a whole lot to share so I didn't feel like rushing to blog about it this morning.

As I feared - the weather here was pretty dreadful - no torrential rain (we got that tonight instead!) but lots of short sharp showers and really gusty wind all day.  That gave us problems as we couldn't get the gazebo up and couldn't display the cards in the normal way as they would have blown away so lots spent their time in boxes.  We ended up outside, at the back of the church where this years fair was, on a market stall next door to the vintage fairground organ (6 hours of tunes like floral dance, delilah and congratulations at about 500 decibels did little to cheer us up!) and unfortunately many of other stalls back there were either moved (food stalls were moved into the cafe within the first hour) or sold out within the first 2 hours of the fair, which meant that few people seemed to find us.  We made a pretty paltry £96, which considering we were open for 2 hours longer than last year when we made £125 was quite disappointing - it was just a pity we weren't up front with the rest of the stalls.

Here's a couple of pics - nothing exciting - but the shot of stall was taken while we were open - we weren't exactly rushed of our feet...........   (we had some other "non blog donated" cards on our stall too which were kept separate from our sales- we raised an extra £12 from those but I won't add that to our total)

This is the delightful fairground organ (it was on the pitch next door to us!)  I should have taken video so you could all have shared in the joy of it's music too - one song was great - by song 130 we never want to hear an organ again!!!

Hopefully the weather will improve for the next fair - and the total with it!

Thanks again for everyone's support.

Tara

Update

Hi All

Just a quick update to let you all know where we're at..........

My hubby and I spent 4 hours last night bagging, pricing and organising all the cards we've received this year ahead of our first fair of 2012 which is tomorrow.  I should have taken a picture of the chaos that was our living room but I couldn't get to the camera (honestly it looked like ones of those programmes about hoarders and I swear we almost lost the cat......) 

We have now had a staggering One Thousand Nine Hundred and Eighty Cards donated since the challenge started last year - yes 1980 - so give yourselves a well deserved round of applause :-D

Now it's over to me to sell them - hopefully the weather will be better tomorrow when we're at St Luke's very own Summer Fair  (it's very wet and windy currently) and we're outdoors with just a flimsy gazebo for shelter :(   I will update the sales total on Sunday once I dry out ;-)  The fair is being held at St Mary's Community Centre this year for anyone local and NOT at the hospice.

We also have another fair on the 23rd June at Heeley City Farm so I will have another update then.

Thanks again for your continued support.

Tara
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