#colourmyeveryday

Last month I took part in a great challenge on Instagram, called #colourmyeveryday. This was the idea of Adventures and Tea Parties, and it was all about discovering and appreciating colour.

I just decided to take part in the challenge at the last minute, after a few of my Instagram friends mentioned it, and I'm really glad I did, because it really did bring colour to my day, and helped me to find lots of new and interesting people to follow on Instagram.

I really enjoyed thinking of ideas for each day's theme, and it was a real challenge to think of ways that I could photograph them to fit my Instagram look and feel. Sometimes I found myself running outside last thing at night in my slippers to catch the fading daylight and get a particular photo! I wrote the prompts on my monthly blog planner, and taped this beside my bed so that first thing each morning I could check what the prompt was.

My absolute favourite day of the challenge was day 26: Door. I'm fascinated with taking photos of colourful doors, or those where the paint is peeling, so I particularly loved looking at all the photos that day. It was hard to choose what photo to post that day, but I chose one that I took in the Cinque Terre in Italy, and it made it into the daily roundup, along with three other amazing photos of doors. I also later in the day posted a picture of my shed door which was inspired by the one in the Cinque Terre.

One of my most popular photos on the challenge was this one for My View, of a new mural that's just been painted on the underpass at the end of my street!

A wonderful side-effect of taking part in this challenge was making connections with so many interesting and creative people. I'd started last month by reaching 200 Instagram followers, and I expected it would be a few months more before I got to 250, but I actually managed it by the end of the month. And they are real followers rather than those annoying follow-unfollow people you get from some other hashtags.