CHAPTER 5 Challenge - Week 1: Tea-things

`And ever since that,' the Hatter went on in a mournful tone, `he won't do a thing I ask! It's always six o'clock now.' A bright idea came into Alice's head. `Is that the reason so many tea-things are put out here?' she asked. `Yes, that's it,' said the Hatter with a sigh: `it's always tea-time, and we've no time to wash the things between whiles.' `Then you keep moving round, I suppose?' said Alice. `Exactly so,' said the Hatter: `as the things get used up.' `But what happens when you come to the beginning again?' Alice ventured to ask. 

The Mad Hatter's tea table was full of tea-things, with place settings all the way around and many teapots and teacups. Your challenge this month is to have a teapot or teacup on your project, and, as an option, to use something OTHER than a stamped image as your focal point!

That's because The Altered Alice design team will be showing off with digital collage sheets from One Crabapple [Etsy Store | Blog], which has of the most interesting and different Alice in Wonderland categories I've seen! The owner and artist is taking care of some family priorities, so if the store is closed when you visit, just put in your email in to be notified when it reopens. It is well worth waiting for I promise; most of the design team members had a difficult time making  their choices and a couple of us needed all of everything in the Alice category! The winner will have their choice of five collage sheets from One Crabapple!

July is a long month, so you have almost four weeks to enter your project! Plenty of time for even our stragglers to play along, just be sure to enter by 11:59 p.m. EDT (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC -4:00) on Friday, July 29. The winner and honorable mentions will be announced the last Sunday of the month on July 31.

Your Weekly Inspiration

Retta Fox of Foxy's Weblog has been inspired and on fire this month with four projects so far, and "Drink Me", a mixed media piece on canvas board, seems an excellent place to start!

The monogram, mushrooms, girl, and both teapots are by the ART TEA LIFE digital collage sheets from One Crabapple. The red polka dot teapot is from a free Christmas digital collage sheet on the One Crabapple blog.  Retta drew the stack of cups on the left herself!  Be sure to visit Retta's blog to see more closeup photos and to leave her a comment on this fabulous piece!

Hmmm. What if Alice was captured while she was very small? She is currently residing in this charming birdcage that Retta Fox found in the dollar bins at Michaels!

Here we can see though the opened top of the cage to Alice enjoying a spot of tea on her mushroom table!  Retta will be sharing more projects with us on the Week 4 inspiration post, so stay tuned!

Tracy Evans was also inspired to create more than one project, beginning with this charming teacup booklet that was cut from a Stampington template. All images are from the One Crabapple digital collage sheets. I love the mix of scales and the gold, black and burgundy with the touch of Alice blue makes a lovely color palette.

The two pages of the booklet are tied together with ribbon and charms. Of course it's always time for tea in Wonderland!

I just love this One Crabapple image of Alice in high heels and anklets! Tracy also used the mushroom and monogram from this collage sheet, and the addition of the crown and teacup charm really add a lot of fun and whimsy!

Tracy's attention to detail is amazing - she used several of the images from the sheet printed onto shrink plastic and turned into charms!  It tickles my fancy to see Alice literally shrunk to a tiny size, just as she was in the book!  Be sure to stop by Tracy's blog to leave a comment!

Tracy's next piece takes the same images into a totally different direction. Tracy layered aqua paint with a layer of crackled ivory paint, then used a transfer technique to add the collage sheet images. By crackling before the image transfer, the piece has been instantly aged!  The interesting thing is that the transfer process reverses the images. Since this sheet contains the word "raven" spelled backwards, the text is now running forward again!

I hope you are now as inspired as I am by these wonderful entries! Be sure to enter by 11:59 p.m. EDT (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC -4:00) on Friday, July 29. The winner and honorable mentions will be announced the last Sunday of the month on July 31.

To enter your creation, use the linky tool below - just click the red link below the thumbnail images. Please list YOUR NAME or YOUR BLOG NAME when you link your entry. The field is long enough that you can also put the title of your piece, but please, please, please put your name first. (Note - if you are viewing this in email or through a reader, you will need to click on the title of this post to view it on the blog.)


Please leave a comment before you go; we love reading them.  Let me know what you think about these fabulous collage sheet images!