Blog Challenge Cards and why I'll no longer be promoting the magazines I subscribe to on my blog

Hello crafty peeps and welcome to my crafty nook! I hope you are all well and enjoying the weekend. It's very hot and muggy here on the Yorkshire coast and we've had a couple of downpours of heavy rain. I've got a dreadful headache which is making me a bit grumpy - I always do when the weather's this oppressive, tbh it's probably not helped by going to bed at 3am then waking up again at 5.10am - two hours is really not enough sleep! No-one asked to join in with the blog challenge but never mind Michele has made a couple of gorgeous cards and I have some to share with you all too.

Wow doesn't Michele's card look amazing!!! I love the bright colours she used and the background paper really goes well with the theme.I love the 3D bubbles too!

 I don't actually drink takeout coffee because I like my coffee very weak (I drink a mild instant coffee usually black) and most coffee shops add shots of strong coffee to their drinks - I have to add a zillion spoons of sugar just to be able to drink it lol so stick to tea when I'm out. However this card looks good enough to drink! Michele made this using a freebie from Simply Cards and Papercraft magazine. I love the coffee bean stenciling and the faux coffee ring marks on the backing paper.

Here are my cards.

My first card uses `the dies in the usual way and I combined them with the impossible card fold and a Wizz Kids paper pack. For my second card I tried to use the dies in a different way and turned the fish bowl into a wide vase for a bouquet of flowers, I added a vellum piece to give the vase a frosted look and layered it on a black background. It looked a bit bare so I added some glittery splatters for added interest. The flowers were die cut using flower dies from my stash and the leaves were cut out using a Memory Box leaf stem die.

Michele and I have enjoyed sharing our creations using magazine freebies but this sort of blog challenge  will be the last one for a while. Michele and I like a lot of people are subscribers to various magazines and as a subscriber you have a certain expectation of the level of service you receive. In recent months a number of magazines that we both subscribe to have fallen short of that expectation. As a subscriber you expect to receive your copy of the magazine a few days before it becomes available to buy in the shops and you also expect to have exactly the same so called "FREE GIFT" that non-subscribers receive, however that really isn't the case. Copies of our magazines primarily ones published by Practical Publishing are frequently late - in one instance earlier in the year one magazine arrived TEN DAYS after it became available to buy in the shops, sometimes they arrive the day before they go on sale but it is now the norm that they turn up the day it goes on sale or a day or two later. This isn't good enough but what particularly grates on me is the fact that subscribers don't get the same so called "FREEBIES" if these gifts are indeed FREE why do non-subscribers regularly get extra ones that subscribers are denied? The latest example is the free gift with Papercraft Essentials Magazine, in last month's issue it states that the free gifts are a stamp and die set with a bonus embossing folder yet subscribers DIDN'T receive the bonus embossing folder with this month's issue. This is blatantly unfair to subscribers and I don't feel that I can continue to promote the magazines involved through my blog and as a result I will not be sharing cards made with the freebies on this blog. There is an exception to that, I'm not yet a subscriber but hope to be soon to a magazine called Making Cards - I frequently buy it direct online because their free gifts are brilliant, the magazine is about market value so not overpriced unlike a lot of Practical Publishing magazines (I've noticed the coverprices have creeped up substantially the past 18 months!) they don't charge you postage to send you their mags direct unlike moremags.com (very expensive and bloody slow! Your mag can be out of date by the time you actually get it!) and subscribers get exactly the same free gifts as non-subscribers. Plus I really like the quality of the free gifts, quite frankly about one third of the freebies with Practical Publishing are utter crap and go in the "might use if I run out of better things to use" box (most still in there!) rather than my regular stash - a lot of the freebies lack imagination and originality (I mean honestly how many butterfly/dragonfly/floral stamps does one crafter actually need?? They're even repeating themselves now - we got a dragonfly stamp and die set a few years ago and the exact design earlier in the year just slightly bigger *rolls eyes*) If there is a particularly good free gift AND it is as stated in the magazine, then I may share cards I've made on Facebook or Twitter but until things improve I'll not be sharing them here.

Hope that wasn't too much of a rant - I feel very let down by Papercraft Essentials Magazine and their parent company Practical Publishing, I have been a very loyal subscriber for years (over ten for some magazines) and I've been left feeling very unappreciated by their unfair treatment of subscribers.

Hopefully my next card share will be a lot less angry lol, I hope you all enjoy the rest of your weekend and until next time - keep crafting!

Love and crafty hugs,

Sarah xxx