Polka Dot Party with a Dash of Thrill

Hello lovelies.  Have you bagged yourselves something wonderful in the Black Friday sale ?  I haven't looked...haven't had the time.  I am trying to sneak this post in before I have to dash off to my son's 18th birthday party.

I have worked with Dear Lizzy Polka Dot Party by American Crafts.  I am going through a period of loving pink and pastel.

Isn't it the prettiest range ?  I have only ordered 3 or 4 of the papers from the range.  Having used a fair bit up, I am considering getting a few more.  Because I love a lot of patterns, each in small quantities, I ordered two papers that features multiple patterns organised as journalling cards. 

First I made a layout about my son's ( the other one, who was celebrating his 15th) birthday cake.

Next is a layout about our roller coaster ride that was his birthday treat.

Do check out the die cut shapes. I adore the pink camera, the pink cat, the towing caravan etc...

That is all from me this time.  See you next month.

Lift yourself

Hi Tracy G here with you today. From time to time I think we all suffer a bout of creative block. Well I have been suffering this month, and whenever I sat at my desk my mind just wandered, even though I had all my supplies in front of me I couldn't find any inspiration. I didn't know how to get myself out of my scrappers block and started to get quite stressed out about it. It was then I looked up at my bookcase and decided to have a look through one of my albums,  I came across the layout I taught at the 2012 retreat and decided to scrap lift it. I rotated the page 90 degrees and without too much thought I created a page I was quite pleased with. So if you're ever stuck for inspiration, have a look at what you've created in the past and hopefully it will help you out too.

Here's the original layout,

 and my scrap lifted version.

All the papers I used on my scrap lifted layout are from this pack.

Happy Go Lucky

Hi folks. Jen G here again. Just a quick post before I knuckle down to the Christmas Crafting that I have planned. Before Halloween took over my craft table I had these lovely Fancy Pants Happy Go Lucky Frames to work with.

They were perfect for these multi - photo pages that I had planned of my 7 year old son. One featured pictures of his birthday treat day. Two of the photos were of him and his friends, but I wanted the focus to be on the one of him by himself. I did this by popping a frame over that photo then raising it up on foam pads. 

For the next page I wanted to use a picture of him being soaked on a Summer day by my husband and the garden hose. The picture wasn't a great one, but by popping a frame over Josh as he ran into the water the eye is draw to that part of the picture. I can't help but giggle every time I look at his expression!

Lastly I had collaged together 4 photos from his sports day. I popped the frame around my favourite one of the four as he is actually looking towards the camera on that one. I added a ticket from the coordinating ticket roll and a title using stickers from the fundamentals sheet.

The Happy Go Lucky range is a lovely one to work with. Have you used it yet?

A Post Halloween Post

Hi all. What with Christmas decorations all around us, Halloween seems like a long time ago already! I just thought I would pop a couple of pages on here using the same stash that I used to make the party bags and book marks. The range is Pebbles Thirty-One and it includes these amazing photo overlays. 

You simply pop them over the top of a photograph to give it a whole extra dimension. 

On this LO I put an overlay over the photo to give it a spooky vignette appearance as well as the orange and text border. 

I also attached one with a spider and web design on it over some orange chevroned paper. I then cut this in half and positioned it behind the photograph. 

 I added "Happy" in black glittered Thickers to finish off the title. 

On this next LO I used one of the polaroid style overlays over my little trick-or-treaters. 

 The wording on the overlay plus a "Trick or Treat" Chalkboard Label Sticker provide title enough so I just added the year in orange glittered Thickers this time.

 So that is it for Halloween from me until next year. Time for Christmas? 

Quick Make!!

Hello strangers!

Nat here just popping by to share a quick and handy make with you!

I needed some pencil pots for school and had found some empty jelly pots in our art room which I decided to repurpose for the job. I'd intended to cover them with some beautiful owl sticky back plastic I'd been harbouring for ages, except when I opened it, it turned out to be wrapping paper. Gutted. Gorgeous, but not durable!

I then thought about my ever-growing Washi collection and could suddenly smell potential!

Five minutes later, I had cute pencil pots ready for action! The Days of the week MME tape on the top serves as a visual aid for my pupils too. I'm hoping I can bag a few more of these jelly pots to make some more, they are a lovely shape and quite strong and durable....perfect pretty pencil pots!

{Owls, birds & glitter}

Hi, it's Jen N here again today with something a little different to my usual scrapbooking this month. Having had a daughter recently I was in need of some cute decorations for the walls of her nursery. Not knowing whether we were having a girl or boy we kept the walls cream, so when she arrived we had a totally neutral base room which to start personalising the room. We chose a pink and aqua colour scheme and have been gradually adding details over the last couple of months.

 
I have created a set of three pictures to go up in her room, using scrapbooking supplies from the shop. I started off by sketching out a rough design onto a 7x5" area. As you can see I have made a few small changes from the original sketch, but this gave me something to start from. There's a big wall mural in her room which is a tree featuring birds and owls, so the choice of icons was easy, and I took inspiration from the shapes found there and from some clip art and appliqué designs found on a google image search (search for something like owl outline or owl colouring in page to get good results).

 The process of turning the sketches into finished pieces was quite simple. I used the sketch as a template by first photocopying it and then cutting out the bigger shapes and drawing around them on the back of the patterned paper. This project was the perfect way to indulge my love of patterned paper! I used 12x12 sheets with small repeating patterns, but the smaller scale of 6x6 papers would make them great for this kind of project too.

With all the main pieces cut out I started to assemble the design, and glue it all together. To add some detail to the pictures I used American Crafts Wow glitter for a little sparkle. I chose a few areas to add the glitter and applied glue with a cocktail stick so that I could follow the patterns of the paper. It's pretty tricky to photograph glitter effectively, but each piece has several glittered areas & it's a lovely and very pretty effect. Finally I stuck the whole piece to 7x5" white card and mounted with the pink ombre paper from My Mind's Eye.

 I really enjoyed taking my patterned papers outside the box a little this month, and perhaps you'll do the same. I have also been leaving little sparkly trails all over my house, because I tipped a fair amount of glitter onto myself. Whoops! Moral of that story - always replace the lid. See you next month!

November 2013 Sketch Challenge

Another month is rolling by and we have another new Sarah's Cards Blog Sketch Challenge, by me Vanessa :-

The design team have created a wonderful variety of pages using the sketch (apologies for the very bad photo of my layout, my usual camera is broken, so I used an old one and it is terrible for taking photos in artificial light) :-

If you would like a chance to win a £20 Voucher for Sarah's Cards Ltd, create a layout inspired by this month's sketch and post a link to your work in the comments section below.  The deadline is 30th November 2013.

Thanks for looking :) x

Horses and hearts...

This month, I chose three different ranges to use: Glitz 'Wild and Free', Glitz 'Finnley' and Elle's Studio 'Penelope'.  I was particularly attracted to the bright colours and graphic patterns.

I tend to print my photos at home but the colours have been running low in our printer.  To get round this and  to ensure that the colours in the photos didn't clash with the bright papers, I decided to change my photos to a sepia colour using Picasa software.  I really like the warm feeling that this gives the photographs.

As soon as I saw the horse paper, I knew that I had to use it to record our holiday in Exmoor where Exmoor ponies roamed all around us.  I combined some woodgrain paper to tell the story of when one of the horses licked George's knee - much to his disgust - a story which he still tells us all of the time!  I added a few stitches, using an Amy Tangerine stitching template, around the page in a coordinating colour.

The girly colours of the Penelope range were ideal for scrapping this photo of Evie at the end of our annual birthday shopping trip.  The background paper is pre-printed with a grid and the bunting in the top right.  I further embellished this area with some stickers and staples and scattered a few enamel dots and veneer shapes across the page.

 

Say Cheese! ...and make sure you read to the end for an announcement :)

Hi all. Jen G here. The LO's I have to share today follow on from Lou's last post about not letting a "themed" range name put you off. At first glance I thought Simple Stories new release Say Cheese range was very Disney themed. However, on looking at it again I realised that it was actually very subtle in it's Disney hints. As I loved the colours in the range (we all know I love a good red!) I decided to go for it. The photos I chose to scrap are all from our recent mini-break at Legoland Windsor and Warwick Castle. 

Some are very Patterned Paper heavy:

This one, however, uses a minimal amount of the Patterned Papers, allowing the photos to pop from the page.

I enjoyed Tracy's sketch so much that I made a second version of it, this time for my eldest son's album.

This photo has been scrapped before, but as you already know I like to include some group shots in each of my boys' albums. If you don't already know the story behind this photo you'll have to scroll back to my September layouts for a good giggle! The spelling "error" is actually meant to be there (for once!)

So, time for the announcement. We have a winner for our October Sketch challenge! 

Congratulations Elizabeta!

We loved the Autumnal colours you chose on your page. Contact Lianne for your prize :) 

It was lovely for us to see a few new participants in our monthly challenge. Please do come back again in a few days for our next sketch. 

Happy Camper

Hello all, it's Louise here with 4 LO's to share. A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to be able to choose the stash I wanted to work with in real life rather than online. I'm so glad I did because I immediately fell in love with the Happy Camper Stew and Irish Farm House Soup ranges by Jillibean Soup. These are not something I would have been likely to look at had I have been buying online, but I really loved the colours and the designs of the papers.
I also chose a sheet of American Crafts, Cut & Paste, Heart Throb paper. I usually struggle with what embellishments to choose, but I was drawn to these Amy Tan Cut & Paste, Bits Die Cut Tags. They may seem pricey at first glance, but you get 12 good quality tags with designs that are really usable. I will definitely be buying another set before they go out of stock.

My first LO was of the three boys taken sitting on one of the fab sculptures at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. A couple of my fellow DT members said I had to use the map side of one of the papers, and it actually went really well with this photo. I cut off the water and key parts of the map, so that I was left with a woodland map. This became the perfect paper for the Sculpture Park LO.

I used the heart tag, stitching in lines and using French knots as well as running stitch. I folded over the tag and stapled the fold in position, and embellished it with washi tape and a heart cut from the Amy tan paper.

For my title I used these Die-Namics dies. They're paper thin and these were just the right size to use in my Sizzix Side Kick... which had the cobwebs blown off it and will be used much more often now I've seen some of the great dies from this company.

If you haven't used a die cutting machine before they're really easy to use.

You put the die on the cutting plate (and a spacer if needed).

Put your paper over the top of the die.

Sandwich with the other cutting mat and roll through the machine.

Ta Da! a perfectly cut title with very little effort.

You may have looked at these dies and thought that they were quite expensive, but when you think that you will have them forever, can cut titles in any coordinating colour/pattern for your LOs, never running out of the letters you need... you can see that they're a very good investment.

My second LO is of a fun photo of Drew taken in the park in the summer. We often take chalks with us to draw on the pavement, and on this day I drew him a crown to make him the prince of the park.

The rainbow swirl was created with quilling papers. I often think how pretty they are when they're all stuck together unused in the pack, so kept them together and stuck them straight down to my LO. I love the result.

I used the arrow from the dies cut tags, stitching around the outside, and creating a curve using straight lines in one corner. I added a couple of the cute little arrow stickers from the Project Life range, and used a roller phrase stamp.

I raided my stash and found some really old crown rub ons that I thought I'd never use, and added 3 to the LO.
This little pink clip has also been in my stationary collection for years, but was perfect to add just the little touch of pink needed in the corner of the LO.
I cut out the air mail detail from a sheet of paper, and added a few arrows along the edge to lead your eyes in to the LO.
A few random circles were doodled on to the LO and the hand cut hearts were doodled round with a black pen.

My next LO is another of Drew... this time with his friend 'the naughty goat' from the birds of prey park we visited in the summer. The boys (my own terrible trio and the Garratt boys) had great fun winding up the goats, and thought that it was hilarious when they stole the stamp booklets they had and ate them!!! It was definitely the highlight of Drew's day.

I used a Studio Calico days of the week snippet behind my photo (I knew I absolutely needed these moths ago when I bought them).

I punched mini stars from a card cut from one of the papers. I love how subtle they are because of their teeny size.

On this LO I used the speech bubble tag, cutting the detail from the tag and using the positive shape as a mat for the start of my title.
The negative shape was tucked behind my photo.

My final LO is of Harry. Its a just because LO of a photo taken when he was just being Harry, having fun outside. I misted the green patterned background paper with yellow and orange, splattering a few drops of the orange.

This love tag detail was cut from a sheet of patterned paper and embellished with 3 strips of tape. I also used the negative shape of the letter H from a die cut.

I stitched a chevron design in two colours onto one of the tags, leaving the ends long and fraying them for a messy look. My title was die cut from the grid paper, and also from the packaging of the tags... waste nothing I always say!   I'm really happy with these LOs created from ranges that I would have dismissed due to their names. It just goes to show you really shouldn't judge before taking a close look. I hope I've inspired you to be a Happy Camper or a Irish Farm House Soup lover.   Be sure to come back every couple of days to see what the rest of the DT have been busy creating.