Do you DIY ?

Hi people. It is Ifa with you today. Hope you have recovered from the retreat.

Have you seen these ?

DIY Thickers! What a great idea...undecorated Thickers in all your favourite fonts. So many possibilities.

The DIY Thickers have adhesive, both top and bottom. You peel off the top cover to add glitter, micro bead or tinsel.

I started with my favourite font, Sprinkles.

Mine is decorated with MicroBead in Leaf. Here's the complete layout.

The top adhesive paper is matte. If you keep it on, it can also be doodled on

for a layout documenting my son's obsession with Lego.

You could also stamped on the matte cover and highlight with coloured pens.

From doing these layouts, I have discovered that the bottom adhesive is very strong so it was not easy to add glitter/bead elsewhere and then transfer to the layout. So I ended up sticking the letters on my layout and then add the glitter. To avoid getting trapped glitter/bead, try to decorate your Thickers on your layout before adding too much to the layout.

The Thickers are made out of foam so when I tried to move the letters, the foam has a tendency to stretch which is why the letters in Playground are a little skewed.

March 2012 Retreat: Class Layouts...

So far this week, we've shared some of the photos from last weekend's retreat.  The DT worked hard to create some layouts that were taught in the classes to the delegates which we thought we'd share here too.

Claire's class: creating a paper flower and the cardboard, distressed window feature.

Helen's class: a 'any size' (12x12, 8.5x11 or A4) layout with glitter splats, cutting a chevron pattern and a place for extra journaling or photos.

Ifa's class: misting with masks, buttons and twine and handdrawn/cut birds.

Lou's class: lots of details, handmade embellishments all placed onto a grid design.

Jen's class: ideas for using acetate, twine and butterflies and how to cut paper into a sunburst pattern.

Tracy's class: subtle effects with a mask, lots of layering and a hidden tag.

We hope that we gave you some ideas to use on your own pages or if you didn't attend, some inspiration now to get you scrapping.

Finally, here's a photo of the hardworking team:

We'd love to see your versions of our layouts and indeed, any of the pages that the delegates created during the weekend.  There were some stunning entries for both the kit and sketch challenges which would be great to see again.  Leave a comment here or add a link to our Facebook page.

More photos as promised.

A lot more infact! Hi, it's Jen G here again. I tried hard to get a shot of everyone over the weekend I hope I got you all on at least one photo.


First, however, I have one more layout to share with you. I used all the same products as the set of 3 I shared with you yesterday only adding a sheet of Grey Wood, Bakers Twine in Oyster and some random buttons.
The photographs are from my son's 3rd birthday but not a single one of them was a "wow" photo. I still felt the need to scrap the event though, so I printed several small pictures off. I then cut pieces from all of the papers to create the grid. Most of the photos fit perfectly onto the grid with just one being mounted onto white then kraft to become the main focal photo. The twine, buttons and a couple of heart stamps were the final touches. A perfect way to use up scraps in my opinion. How do you use up yours?

Ok, ok, on to the photos!

The 2 most lovely ladies we know.

BINGO!
Crop room photos.

One of our well deserved challenge winners of the weekend.

The classrooms.

(shhhhhhh!)

Hands up if you ate too much, because I sure did!

Make and Takes

Shopping!

There are lots more photos on our Facebook page

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/sarahscardsltd

Come and have a peek!

The New Girl on the Team.

Hi there. It’s Jen G here with my first blog post as an official DT member. We have just had the most amazing retreat weekend - a huge thank you to everyone who came along and made the weekend the success it was. I will add some photos here in the next couple of days. For now I have some layouts to share with you.

Just a few days before joining the team I ordered some of the lush new “On The Bright Side” papers from My Mind’s Eye. I’m always drawn to papers with red in them – real red, not pinky red or orangey red but RED. The “Red Wood” paper is a really nice shade of “real” red. Once that sheet had caught my eye most of the coordinating papers fell into my basket too. I had some snowy day photos in my “to scrap” pile so I set to work. This is when I hit upon a dilemma I come across now and again. I have 3 sons aged 7, 5 and 3. I am fairly methodical in the way I scrap photos of them. They each have their own albums as when they are older I hope that they will want to take them with them when they fly the nest. Ok, when they first leave home I am sure they will not give a hoot about the scrapbooks mum made! But hopefully when they are older with children of their own they might reconsider. When I scrap a photo of all 3 of them I have to decide which album to put it in. Occasionally I want it to go in all 3 albums so I end up scraping the same photo 3 times. That is what I ended up doing with these photos. The layouts are all very similar which speeds up the process and gives a little uniformity to the pages.

The first page is for my 7 year old. He is the ringleader – if he strikes a silly pose the other two are sure to copy. Thanks to this, the only snowy day photos I got of them all are silly ones! I cut out a line of chevrons from the "Blue Wood" and the "Red Wood" papers and layered the photos on top of the "Multi Chevron" paper using the patterns from both sides. The little camera details are cut from a sheet of Echo Park This & That “Instamatic” paper. I used some red American Craft Chipboard Thickers in "Apartment" along with some American Craft Remarks letter stickers for the title. I mounted the whole page onto coordinating red cardstock to finish it off.


The second page is for my 3 year old. I accidentally cut the chevron paper horizontally instead of vertically but it turned out to be a happy accident as I liked the arrow effect this gave. I stuck to the same title as it was the silly poses that I wanted to record.

The final page is for my 5 year old. I stuck to the arrow style strips as I preferred them and again I used the same title. The “handsome and charming” sticker came from a sheet of My Mind’s Eye Miss Caroline “Dilly Dally Best Stickers”.

So, I have 3 layouts from just 5 pieces of patterned paper, 2 colours of cardstock and some American Craft alphabets. There was also so much left over that I will back tomorrow with a fourth LO made with the same paper range. I'll also post some retreat photos, but to tide you over, here is my favourite!

By the way - how do those of you with several children arrange your albums? I’d love to know!

* * Products perfect for Project Life * *

Hello all, it's Laura here and today I am going to introduce to you a few products available in the shop that work perfectly for "Project Life"

I know that there are a lot of UK scrappy folk who are jumping on the project life bandwagon but if you are new to the game then have a read up over at Becky Higgins website to find out what Project Life is all about.

For the last two years I have completed a monthly round up of my life in the form of Document 2010 and the Document 2011 but this year I decided to increase my output & complete a weekly spread of our daily lives and weekly activities.  And the great news is that there are so many products in at Sarah's Cards that work perfectly for this style of project.

So.... here is what I incoperated into my week 10....

 

I like to mix my page protectors up throughout my album and I use a mixture of American Crafts, WRMK and Project Life.  Sarah's Cards stock a huge variety of spilt page protectors and you can find them all here. 

I use a variety of photos in my pages too, including 6x4 prints from my camera and small square instagram shots from my iphone!

Week 10 was a mixture of regular home life activities and other bits that were more important and worth documenting.   From this double page spread here you can see that I documented thank you letters recieved in the post, my baby playiong with her Daddy after work, being asked to be a bridesmaid, having a lunch date out at Giraffe and a day trip to see a friend in London. 

My first tip is to seek out small alphabets, theses are perfect for small layouts and mean that you can fit in a tiny title alongside plenty of journalling.  In the photo above I used some Authentique letters alongside some gorgeous Fancy Pants letters, though there are a HUGE selection of perfect alphabets in stock at the moment! Here are just a few of my favourites...

From top to bottom, left to right... here we have..

1. Authentique Celebrate Letters - Two sets of tiny letters and a whole glossary of single word stickers that are perfect to embellish your albums.

2. Studio Calico.  Found in aqua and red and a gorgeous grey

3. The perfect alphabeans from Jillibean soup.  These have arrived in the shop since I created these pages but they are just perfect for Project Life, a full upper and lower case alphabet in SEVEN stunning colours.

4. An old (ish) favourite from Lily Bee Design in new colourways staright from the halls of CHA.  Check out the new colours here, here and here.  EIGHT sets on EACH set!

5. In the centre of the grid above is a gorgeous delicate alphabet that co-ordinates with the Dear Lizzy Neapolitan collection, found in Parakeet and a slightly larger font in Ballerina

6. My Little Shoebox make a whole range of perfect little letters at a great price.  The new CHA colours are sky, chiffon, red lipstick and kisses.

7. Crate Paper Pretty Party have this alphabet sheet that showcases two alphas and a matching set of sticker embellishments.

8. A similar sheet of alphas and stickers by Echo Park can be found here

and lastly 9. The sheet I used in my week was by Fancy Pants

I also use a lot of stickers in my Project Life pages, these have a couple of benefits... they are flat and when creating small layouts in these spilt page protectors you really want to keep them quite flat (save your 3D embellishments for your 12x12 pages).  They are also quick to add, a big bonus if you want to stay up to date with this project and document every week.  And finally you can journal right on top of them!

So in the photo above I used a journalling spot from October Afternoon with a pennant from My Minds Eye.  For my journalling onto stickers I use my old faithful, the American Crafts Precision Pen in 0.3.

As I said earlier I am completing a double page spread like this EVERY WEEK, most weeks I add an additional insert too.  Thats a lot of scrapping and journalling to get done.  So I was thrilled when Sarah's Cards got the new Simply Stories lines in.  These were MADE for Project Life.... quite lliterally I think!  In the photo above you can see a journalling block that has been cut out from this sheet of paper from the Fabulous Collection.  I added a couple of stickers to create a title and then my journalling below.

Sarah's Cards have three simply stories ranges in stock at the moment and there are a huge selection of papers that have 6x4 journalling cards and 3x4 journalling cards incoperated into the patterned paper designs.  Have a look at the three ranges here.

Below you can see an example of where I had added in a piece of real life into my project life, a thank you note.  I have folded it up and added to a 6x4 sheet of patterned paper, if I want to read the note I simply have to pull it out of its page protector to read.   Again the sticker sheets from October Afternoon provided the perfect amount of embellishment underneath the letter.  I used a sheet from an older range, Farmhouse but keep your eye on the "Coming Soon" page of the site for the new October Afternoon collections.

The photo below shows my "starting point" for the week using a Simple Stories 6x4 piece from this paper, embellishments with the aformentioned sticker sheet from My Minds Eye, again the October Afternoon sheet and the wonderfully bright Fancy Pants Letters!

I also added in the dates of the week with one of my favourite new products : The Roller Stamp for the Dear lizzy line.  Sadly this is out of stock by the time I wrote this blog post but keep your eye on the site for re-stocks!

In the photo below you can see another one of my favourite products, a die cut title piece card from My Minds Eye.  Again these are a quick and easy way of adding in title and colour into your small pages in double quick time!

And the great news is that there are a ton in stock at Sarah's Cards and they are all at a brilliant price of around 59p each!

These are some of my favourites...

Have a look through the new My Minds Eye collections to seek out your favourites! They can all be found here.

And my final tip is about pattermed papers... I tend to use papers with small repeated designs on them.  These work well when cut down to small pieces, like this gorgeous butterfly paper from My Minds Eye.  In this example above I wanted to add a small border to my paper before I will add in my journalling above.

And last but not least a note about albums.  I keep mine in an American Crafts 12x12 patterned D ring album and a huge selection to suit every taste can be seen here!

Happy Project Life !