Paper Players 360 - DT Card

After last week's gorgeous sketch challenge, this week at The Paper Players we have a theme challenge for you.

Back to school is the challenge this week. Of course, in my part of the world it isn't back to school. We still have a term and a half left of the school year and we're a month away from the next school holidays. Still, the start of the school year will come again and it doesn't have to be the beginning of the year to give an encouraging card or a thanks to a teacher either.

This challenge is interesting for me, as I am teacher-librarian at a local secondary school. Although the first instinct with a school theme is bright, primary colours and ABCs, or maybe apples and numbers, I started thinking about the teenagers I mix with every day at work. 

It's a common idea that reading is dead and teens are only interested in their phone or their gaming consoles. Some are but there are still plenty of readers out there. Some of them are even reading on their phones or i-pads because it's not the medium that matters but the story. I'm really lucky to be able to spend parts of my working day talking to them about what they've read, hearing them enthuse about their latest read, musing about when their favourite author's next book will be out and helping them with what they'd like to read next.

Now, I'm a Good Reads girl and keep track of my reading and want-to-reads on Good Reads but not everyone does. I've noticed students scribbling down book suggestions on bits of scrap paper or coming in with a tatty list, which is why my project is an altered notebook made to be a reading journal: a place to jot down titles, interesting quotes, questions and thoughts about your books. There's a matching book mark because no matter how many book marks you have, it's never enough and our print collection is still more heavily used than our e-book collection.

We'd love to have you join us at The Paper Players this week. If you do, there's a couple of simple rules to keep in mind.

1. Create a NEW paper-craft project specifically for this challenge.
2. Upload your creation to your blog with a link back to us.
3. Please provide a direct link to the post featuring your challenge entry.
4. Please link your card to no more than four challenges, TOTAL. Entries linked to more than 4 challenges, including ours, will be deleted without notification.
5. Have fun!

Any products are welcome but if you live in New Zealand and don't have a Stampin' Up Demonstrator to help you with ideas or provide you with wonderful SU products, then please message me on my Facebook Page (link in the sidebar of this blog) or leave a comment below. I'd love to help you craft.

Ingredients

Card: Whisper White, Basic Grey, Lemon-Lime Twist, Fresh Florals DSP, a notebook

Stamps: SU Butterfly Basics, SU Dictionary, Dark Room Door Bookworm

Inks: Lemon-Lime Twist, Basic Grey, Smoky Slate, Tuxedo Black

Other: Grace Taylor Washi Tape, American Thickers chipboard letters, sponge, Lemon-Lime Twist ribbon, White baker's twine, SU scallop-top tag punch.

Retro Rubber Challenge 70 - DT card

Welcome to another challenge from the team at Retro Rubber, the challenge that lets you get out your old stamps for another outing. This week, we have a theme challenge for you: Back to School.

Of course, in New Zealand, it's not back to school at all. For us, it's business as usual, with only a term and half until exams. School is work as I'm the library manager in a secondary school, so naturally books and school are closely related for me! Hence the card...

One of my first on-line purchases was the Bibliophile stamps and co-ordinating dies from Papertrey Ink because it's hard for me to go past a book stamp! I got it sometime in 2015. The best bit of the set is really the reading quotations because the dies to make the book spines are large, meaning there's not that many different ways to lay them out on a card front. However, you can play around with colour and there are many different ways to combine the various reading quotes from authors as well as lots of different bits to create interesting spine designs.

The Dictionary background stamp from Stampin' Up is one of my favourites. It first appeared in the 2013-14 Annual Catalogue, although I wasn't a stamper back then.

We'd love to see what you do with this theme: maybe something bookish, maybe something mathematical, maybe something science-y, or perhaps a good luck to a student for a new year -  or even something for a beginning teacher as one of the Design Team members has done.

There's only a couple of other things to remember if you decide to play along with us.

1. Use at least one stamp that's older than a year.

2. Tell us how old that stamp is (approximately).

3. Don't link up to more than a total of ten challenges.

You have until 8 September to link up with us at Retro Rubber Challenge.

Ingredients

Card: Bermuda Bay, So Saffron, Pool Party, Whisper White

Stamps: SU Dictionary, PTI Bibliophile

Inks: Pool Party, Tuxedo Black

Other: PTI Bibliophile co-ordinating dies