Welcome to today's Guest Designer, Toni!

Today we are welcoming Toni of Artistic Craft Dabbler as our Guest Designer. Toni was the DT winner of the From the Heart challenge and therefore was asked if she'd like to join us for a day.

So, without further ado let's move on to hear from Toni and see her gorgeous project!

Hi everyone! I’m Toni and I’m excited and honoured to have been invited to be a Guest Designer for the new 'Autumn Colours' challenge here on the Frilly and Funkie challenge blog.

By day, I’m a part-time peripatetic teacher. Although art was my main subject at teacher training college, my teaching career has been largely in the field of Special Education. I now work with visually impaired children and also teach pottery in a primary school. I have a hard working husband and two grown up sons. Luckily for me, my husband loves nothing more than tinkering about with his various old cars and motorbikes. This means that he doesn’t always notice just how much time I spend in my attic craft room!!

I would describe my style as vintage, grunge with a touch of quirkiness thrown in for good measure! I love altering objects and using recycled materials. My ultimate and never ending delight though, has to be exploring the numerous ways, that a single piece of paper, can be transformed into a thing of beauty, with the ‘simple’ addition of a bit of colour.

With such a great challenge theme, I'm sure there are going to be some truly inspirational projects appearing on the blog. For my 'Autumn Colours' project, I've made another home decor piece similar the heart I made for the ‘From the Heart’ challenge but this time using a chip board circle.

The flowers and leaves are made from die cuts which, I coloured with Dylusions Sprays.  I chose all the colours which suggested autumn to me and just sprayed away until I achieved the effects I wanted. This was lots of inky fun!

The spiky flowers were made from a strip of light weight card which was snipped into a fringe and then coiled up tightly. After adhering the edge I opened out the ‘petals’ and the sprayed on some colour. The purple flower reminds me of a Michaelmas Daisy which flower at this time of year.

I hope you've enjoyed seeing my 'Autumn Colours' project. I've certainly had a great time creating this piece. A very big thank you goes out to all the very talented Frilly and Funkie design team members  for choosing my project for the ‘From the Heart’ challenge and letting me present the new ‘Autumn Colours’ challenge. I’ll certainly be popping back to see what projects you all come up with. Who knows, it could be your turn to present the next challenge! x

I'm sure you'll all agree that Toni's project is absolutely stunning! What fabulous inspiration for the current challenge 'Autumn Colours' If you would like to join us as Guest Designer all you need to do is join in!