A Twinkling Halloween

If you're itching to get your Christmas lights out (I know its waaayyyy too early!), I've found the perfect project to give you the excuse.  Halloween Lanterns!

Its a really straight forward, but effective project, all you need are a stack of clear plastic cups (from the party-ware section in supermarkets), your scrapbooking papers, your usual embellishments and your creativity.  

Firstly, cut with your craft knife, a cross in the bottom of each cup, this is where you will poke the lights through - they will hold.

This is the trickiest part of the project, gradually roll the cup along a piece of paper tracing the movement with a pencil at the top or bottom end of the cup, then carefully roll back again tracing with a pencil at the opposite end.  Once you have a long enough piece, join the sides and cut out.  This will be your template to use to cut out the pieces for each cup, from your chosen paper.  I've used Basic Grey's Persimmon range.

After covering each cup, you can then decorate and embellish as you wish, its as simple as that.  I have inked the edges of each piece of paper, used a ribbler on some.  Covered the edges with trims and borders.

And then hang!

Thanks for looking and keep checking back, the girls have some fab projects coming up.

Halloween and beyond...

I'm not normally one for themed pages or ranges of products but after taking the kids to a Halloween party during the holidays, I had a whole load of pictures that needed scrapping.  The American Crafts 'Nightfall' was ideal for them.  I also noticed that the patterns on some of the sheets or the reverse sides weren't themed at all but perfect for using on layouts of my boys.

So picking out some products from the range, I set about challenging myself to see how many different layouts and looks I could make using just four papers and some tape, stickers and thickers as my main supplies.

I picked out:

'Halloween Night'

'October Night'

'Night Light'

'Fall Fun'

Chalkboard Stickers

Elm Foam Thickers

 

and some Nightfall Mixtape.

'The Garratt's Halloween Party'
My first layout was about the Halloween party that we went to. The spider's web was inspired by a pattern on one of the papers, but because it wouldn't cut out easily, I decided to draw it using a versamark pen and embossed with some black Zing! powder.  I used a mixture of the papers and also the strips from the bottom of the sheets on this page as well as cutting out some of the ghosts and a pumpkins to embellish the page.

'I like Harry Potter!'

My next page again used some photos from Halloween.  Oliver was dressed up as Harry Potter.  During the summer, the Harry Potter films were shown on TV and he loved watching them and continually said 'I like Harry Potter!'  I swear that he actually thought that he was Harry Potter!  I used several strips of the chevron mixtapes, stuck across the page as a bed for the title area.

'Like father, like sons'

This was the third layout that I created using the Halloween collection but this time in a non-Halloween way.  This layout was all about how my two boys love computers.  Well, actually, they love damaging computers, but maybe one day, they'll be mending them too, just like their Daddy!  I used more of the papers, chalkboard sticker and tape, along with some Jenni Bowlin Mini Chalkboard Stickers and Jenni Bowlin Tiny Circle Alpha Stickers.  

'George's Nose Face'

My fourth and final layout (so far) tells the story of George's 'Nose Face'.  I'd typed and printed out some journaling in numbered points about how he makes this face and, trying to use up some more of the papers, I decided to cut out random strips to use as a mat for the photo and also to stick each point onto too.  I cut up one of the chalkboard stickers to use as embellishments on the page, before finishing it all off with a machine stitched frame and some zigzag stitching on some of the strips.

I've still got some scraps of these papers left, so I may still create more pages from them.  I've certainly had good value out of them so far!  Remember, if you want to see the layouts in more detail, then click on the photos to zoom in.