CCL Monthly Theme Challenge - Totally Templates!

Hello, Crafting Friends! It's time to get ready for October's theme challenge over at Creating the Crafty Life! Every month is a theme month at CCL, where we have challenges, tutorials, tips, techiniques, and inspiring projects all centered around that theme. For October, we'll be doing TOTALLY TEMPLATES! How fun is that?! Templates are awesome, because they're so versatile. You can take a flat (paper piecing) template and use it for virtually any paper project; you can make a card, tag, scrapbooking page element, and so much more! For dimensional templates (folded), you can design and decorate your modified versions of the template over and over again, creating many different takes on one template. Stay tuned later this month at CCL for me to post a tutorial where I'll create multiple projects using the same template.

For now, take a look at the project I made as a sample for the theme challenge. The challenge for you is to create a project from a template - that's all! Simply surf the web for a template you like (or create your own, if your super creative!) and make sure you include a before picture of the template, plus a picture of the finished project. I hope mine will inspire you -- I thought it was a really fun project for this time of year!

I used these two templates that I found free from Scrapbooks, Etc.

First, I cut the pieces out and played around with them on a card base, arranging them in different ways, to see what look I wanted to aim for. I then traced the pieces onto colored/patterned papers and fit them together. Another option when paper piecing is to print the template pattern directly onto the various patterned papers you will be using, then cutting the pieces directly out of the patterned papers. **This can be a great time saver!** 

I wanted a nice layered look, so I made sure to choose plenty of different textures and patterns. I also used dimensional foam adhesive squares to pop some of the parts up. I like the monster template SO MUCH that I plan to use him for other projects... think Halloween decorations!

I can't wait to see what everyone creates for the challenge -- if you haven't been over to Creating the Crafty Life be sure to create a (FREE!) membership and check all all the cool stuff available there, including this challenge!

'Til then,

Krolli