Happy New Year

Welcome Back to Crafty Cardmakers. We hope you have had a fabulous Christmas and New Year.

We have a few changes in store for this year. Firstly you will notice, we have a nice new overcoat. The second change we have made is our name, we are now called Crafty Cardmakers and more, to reflect the slightly new direction some of our challenges will be taking.

We have also split the team into three teams, two of which will alternate on weeks where we will be having our traditional type of challenge and the third team are responsible for our new venture.

Every 8 weeks we will be holding a Mixed Media style challenge, which we hope some of you will join in with. These challenges will run for 4 weeks instead of the usual two, and half way through them, there will be a new traditional style challenge, so that the end of the MM challenge and the other challenge will run concurrently and finish at the same time. Hopefully this sounds more complicated than in practice it will prove to be!

For our Mixed Media style challenges we really don't want to see cards, as we are hoping you will be inspired to show us something a bit more arty. So for example, you could make an album cover, or even a whole album, you could create a canvas, upcyle, recyle or repurpose something. Maybe you want to give a tattered old piece of furniture, box or jewellery chest a make over; or come up with something unusual completely from scratch. Whatever you do we would like to see a mixture of different media used and of different techniques.

Of course you will be welcome to add this type of project to any of our other challenges, as long as they fit the bill, but you might want to hold off to show them off in a challenge designed specifically for them.

We have noticed, sadly, an increase in the amount of entrants to our challenges where the project entered just don't fit the challenge theme. Whether this is due to a language barrier, we have no idea, but from now on, if your challenge doesn't meet our theme, sadly we just won't publish it on the blog. We don't want to be mean but we feel we owe it to the people who do make an effort to actually create what we have challenged them to do. Also we feel we owe it to the great companies who have agreed to sponsor us to make sure that their prizes are going to someone who has actually read what we asked. We will continue to moderate entries before publishing as this makes it a little easier for the team, then they know they can concentrate on your works of art and not have to check if you have followed our simple rules or met the theme. We really would appreciate that you actually read the whole of the challenge theme, and not just spot one word and latch onto that.

If we haven't put you off, and I sincerely hope this isn't the case, then we look forward to seeing you back here on 6^th January for our first challenge of 2014.

Until then, we hope that 2014 will be healthy, happy and just plain wonderful for you all!

Lin and the Teams