Letters

My Minds Eye is one of my favourite paper manufacturers, they always seem to come up with designs that are irresistible and the new Stella & Rose range is no exception.

Vanessa has decorated another old box to store her paperwork using this range.  She has combined the papers with a bit of black paint around the edges, a few handmade flowers, thickers and embellishments.  The whole box had been sealed with mod-podge and clear spray sealer.

May Kit

This months kits left Sarah's on Thursday and have started to arrive at their destinations, it is a gorgeous kit packed with MME Stella Rose papers and coordinating embellishments from a variety of manufacturers. Each kit comes with a colour booklet full of layouts that the design team have created along with sketches to inspire your creativity. Here are a just a few of the pages from the booklet, it always amazes me how different all our pages are even though we all started off with the same basic ingredients!

Rachel

Cathy

Lou

Rachael

Canvas Creations!

At last years retreat Sarah, who is extremely clever with a sewing machine, made all the design team aprons to wear. This year she decided to do something a bit different and sent us all a Prima canvas apron to alter as we wanted. This is how the aprons looked before they were attacked with paint, mists, flowers, bling and goodness knows what else!

Sarah hand painted the company logo onto her apron with amazing results. She used vinyl thickers for her title and misted the frill along the bottom and stitched some Prima lace across the apron.

Nat's class involved using felt so she added a gorgeous felt and paper butterfly onto her apron.

Mine is definitely not an original idea, after trawling the net for inspiration I found a class by Donna Downey and just modified it a bit to suit my taste. I have used lots of mists, lace and bling as well as a few flowers and of course the odd butterfly.

Cathy used some letter stickers as masks and then misted over the top before removing them to reveal her wording.

Jens gorgeous rainbow creation with lots of little punched butterflies and hand made flowers.

Tracy made her flower out of buckram which she cut using the Tim Holtz tattered florals die, she sprayed them with mist and after they had thoroughly dried she layered them up and curled them. She misted her background to coordinate with her flowers.

Claire's apron is a work of art, she has hand drawn the design and then painted it in, stunning.

Vanessa's apron coordinated with her class with this gorgeous zesty colour scheme although she did have a few issues with orange hands over the weekend!

Perfect Day

I have always been a big fan of the Crate ranges, the Neighbourhood one I have used on this page is a really fun collection with a good amount of neutral papers that aren't too overbearing.

I love this photo taken at my friend Laura's wedding, we had a amazing day and I think this photo has been scrapped by all the girls in the photo. I was a bit nervous scrapping such a big photo, as it can be difficult to arrange things around them. I started with the 'Garden' paper as a background, all these papers are very background friendly, I really like the 'Picnic' page, its just asking to be cut up but I really wanted to use some of the square side just to lift the photo off the page. 

Laura had the most gorgeous bunting at her wedding and when I saw this gorgeous bunting stamp by Jenni Bowlin I knew I had to use it, I stamped it onto Kraft and cut it out, it's a really nice size so not too fiddly to cut. 

I added some Maya Road grosgain pleated ribbon to finish the bunting off as well as a starburst punch and the cute buttons from the collection.

I also used the stickers from the collection to add a bit more of a feature in the corner and got to cut that Picnic paper. 

Have you made any pages with a really big photo? If so we would love to see them, if you don't mind sharing why not link them to this post.

Rachel Ward

Sketch Challenge

Challenge time again, I don't know where the time goes, this months great sketch has been designed by Nat. All you have to do to play along is create a layout or card using the sketch for inspiration, then leave us a link to your creation in the comments box by Monday 30th May. The winner will be announced later that week on the blog and receive a £10 e-voucher to spend in the shop along with the opportunity to design an example page for the July challenge.

 Last months challenge was won by Jill and she has joined us this month and created this stunning page using MME Stella and Rose papers.

Rachel has used the sketch to create this lovely page of her Granny.

Cathy has created this gorgeous page using MME papers, as you can tell they are still a big hit with the design team!

Lou has used a variety of papers to create this page including American Crafts, Crate and Lily Bee along with Glitz and MME stamps.

I have created my page using the gorgeous Pink Paislee Butterfly Garden range.

We hope you enjoy using the sketch as much as we have and we can't wait to see what you create!

Sketch Challenge Winner

Time once again to announce the winner of last months sketch challenge, we had some stunning entries which made choosing the winner very hard. We could only choose one and our winner is Abi with her gorgeous page entitled "Blog", Abi said the sketch took her out of her comfort zone as she rarely scraps using circles. You have done an amazing job Abi,congratulations, drop us a line and we will get your £10 e-voucher to you and details of the June sketch challenge.

Check back later in the week for our new sketch challenge, this months sketch has been designed by Nat.