Sarah's Cards Ltd

Monday, 18 March 2013

A Wonderful Weekend!

The past weekend saw the fifth, and final (for now) Sarah's Card's Retreat. It was a fabulous weekend as usual, full of fun, laughter and scrapbooking.

We had six fabulous classes:

Bright and funky Family by Tracy Gough

Mon Bebe incorporating some clever origami bows by Claire Wheatley

A Project Life style divided page by Jen Naulls

Louise Stevenson got everyone doodling with her This Clan Rocks class

The delicate Together by Ifa Zainon used some pretty stamp embossing techniques and badge making

And Helen Eddie got everyone sewing with her bright patterned design

All delegates rose to the challenges and worked on their layouts diligently...some (who will remain nameless) actually following the instructions for the first time ;)

The crop room was the place to scrap at our leisure:

When not cropping, we all busied ourselves with our second love.....shopping!

All this hard work required a god source of energy, which could be found at the sweet table

No retreat would be complete without our evening entertainment in the forms of our resident Bingo Caller, Tracy Bingo,

and Quiz Mistress Helen "Keep The Noise Down at the Back" Eddie.

As it was team member Jen G, and delegates Natalie Jane and Candace's birthdays, it was only right that we celebrated with a giant cake!

The delegates made a beautiful presentation to Sarah & Lianne of flowers and a very special layout signed by everyone present, which the DT would like to thank Carla and Claire for organising:

We hope that everyone had a fantastic time, and went home with aching sides and happy memories as well as layouts to be proud of!

Sarah, Lianne and all of us on the DT would like to thank all our attendees, past and present, for your company over the past five retreats - we really will (for now!) miss the banter, jokes and your company that we've come to know and love, and which makes the Sarah's Cards Retreat special to us all.

Love,

The Sarah's Cards 2013 Design Team

xxxxxx

Tuesday, 12 March 2013

{Basics}

It's Jen N here again with a closer look at one of the new ranges into the shop - the Basics range by Pebbles Inc. This is a hugely versatile and usable line consisting of papers in a rainbow of colours, and available in popular designs such as polka dots, chevrons and grids. In addition to the papers there are also stickers, die cuts, thickers alphabets, journalling cards, chipboard pieces and wooden pegs. My favourite product that they've added to this collection is the washi tape - it comes in sets of two coordinating rolls, in polka dot and chevron designs and is about half the width of your usual washi tape. It's great!
Click the image below to go straight to the products in the shop.

I've created three pages using a selection of goodies from the range. The first uses strips of paper to make a patterned background. The bright colours complimented this slightly obscure photo of me holding a miniature pineapple! These featured in the table flowers at my sister's wedding last year, and were a firm favourite with all the guests. I managed to snag one to keep! On the top and bottom paper strips I added a row of tone on tone punched hearts on foam pads, to give a little dimension and interest.

For this next page I chose a more select set of colours from the palette, to compliment the photos of my little boy enjoying our garden after it was landscaped. We had it converted from gravel and waist height raised beds to a lawn, and he just loves it! I punched lots of various sized circles from the papers and arranged them under my photo strip, raising the bottom edges up on foam squares to give some depth.

My last page for today was inspired by the page I created and taught at last year's scrapbooking retreat. It features s sunburst effect, and one of my favourite photos from my sister's wedding. Benjamin was pageboy and looked so adorable in his little suit! He carried a little plaque down the aisle which said "here comes the bride", and was completely unfazed by 70 odd people watching him.

Speaking of the retreat, the annual Sarah's Cards scrapbooking retreat is taking place this weekend. If you are joining us for the fun then I'll see you there! If not, just a quick reminder that shop orders placed after 10pm on 12th March will be processed once Sarah and Lianne are back in the office, from Monday 18th March onwards.

Sunday, 10 March 2013

~* March Sketch Challenge *~

Welcome to March...is it Spring yet? The rain, and forcast snow, seems to be saying otherwise, but hopefully we can at least but a "spring" in your scrapbooking with this month's Sketch Challenge!

As always, there is a £20 e-voucher for the online shop up for grabs, and all you have to do to is create a page using the following sketch by Natalie, and pop a link to your entry in the Inlinkz widget at the end of the post.

Here's how the DT interpreted the sketch:

Nat swapped the circle shapes for hexagons on her bright and cheery page:

Jen G confesses she saw the circle idea and ran with it on her fab Sparkler page:

Tracie chose some beautifully rich-toned papers as the perfect compliment for her picture on her lovely page:

Vanessa 's white background really made her bright colours pop in her close interpretation of the sketch:

Claire's take on the sketch used delicate patterned papers to compliment the "Natural" theme she wanted to create:

We look forward to seeing your entries!

Wednesday, 6 March 2013

February Challenge Winner

Thank you for joining us in the sketch challenge last month. I enjoyed seeing your take on the sketch and reading the stories behind your layouts. After much deliberation with the rest of the design team, we have picked one winner.

Drum roll please for Julia Heald with "Facebook foibles of a fourteen year old".

Julia has definitely embraced "a very long title" concept that I love so much. LOL at "Like if you think mymaths is stupid". I also have a fourteen year old but I most definitely don't know what goes on in his Facebook.

Julia, please email lianne@sarahscardsltd.com to claim your prize. Congratulations again, and enjoy your spending spree.

Thank you everyone who played along. These challenges are only possible with your input. I hope you will join us in the next challenge on the 10th.

Sunday, 3 March 2013

Scribble Sketches Take 2

Hi it's Louise again with another 3 LOs using the same sketches as in my previous post.
For the following LOs I rotated each sketch so that they were landscape orientation.
The list of papers used can be found at the end of the previous post.

Sketch 1

This LO shows Drew being an enthusiastic dentist with his new play doh set. I used the centre of the die cut embellishment that was cut away from the centre of the frame used on the Scootering LO in my previous post.

I love mixing fonts in my titles, and its a fun way to use up the letters you have left from various sets.

Sketch 2

Harry very rarely gives you a full on mega watt smile, but he was so proud to be awarded with his Bronze Learning Lion certificate at the end of his class assembly that we got this lovely photo. I used some really old Sassafras stickers to embellish this LO.

Sketch 3

These photo of Drew were just a few taken from the day he learnt to climb the slide. It took him a while and there was a lot of grunting and whinging, but he did it, and there was no stopping him after this! Instead of creating a strip of photos, I overlapped small photos along the bottom edge of my LO so that I could fit them all on.

Again I've used random alphas to create my title, and this time I used a number of October Afternoon stickers I've had for a while to embellish.

So with just 3 very quickly scribbled sketches, you can see how easy it is to create 6 LOs. Please feel free to use these sketches to inspire you, and post a link to your gallery/blog so I can drop by and leave you a comment.

Don't forget to come back every few days to see what the rest of the DT have been up to.

Saturday, 2 March 2013

Scribble sketches!

It's Louise here again with 3 LOs to share. I love using sketches when my mojo needs a bit of a kick start, and there are so many available on the Internet, and of course we have our very own monthly sketch challenge for you to play along with.
Quite often I have ideas for LOs spring into my head when I'm in the middle of doing something else, so I usually grab a pen and quickly scribble down the idea as a rough sketch. Believe it or not, the sketches below are the 'tidied up' versions... the originals are often really scruffy, and sometimes drawn on receipts, old packaging and other bits of paper found laying about. This month I'm sharing 3 of my sketches with you, and showing how I've used them to create 6 LOs. I chose a selection of papers to use this month and a couple of cute stamps from Elle's Studio. A list of all the papers I used can be found at the end of this post.

Sketch 1

My first LO is of Drew on his new scooter on Christmas day. As he was zooming about on it, I kept thinking about 'scootering in heels' from a Sex and the City episode, hence the title 'Scootering'.

I cut the arrow frame from this My Mind's Eye die cut embellishment.

When I used my date stamp, part of the month didn't stamp out. Rather than using a black pen to fill in the missing detail I used a green pen to make a feature of the misprint.

Sketch 2

I've been meaning to scrap this photo of Harry and I out sledging since it was taken way back in the day when my hair was lighter and longer!

The little stamps from Elle's Studio were used on this LO, and were enough that I didn't feel I needed to add a title.

Sketch 3

I had lots of photos taken of the children dancing along to Just Dance at New Year, but none of them were particularly good quality that they could be scrapped individually. I made 3 of the best into a film strip with a black border, which meant that they were small and so the picture quality was less important.

The background was decorated with stamps and clear embossing powder before being given a light misting with white and then teal.

I chose the yellow spotty paper as my background and chose a couple of My Mind's Eye stamps that I've had for a couple of years. Using versa-mark and clear embossing powder I added more detail to the paper.

I used an embossing pen to add powder to some of the circles on the paper. The blue tint of the pen gives a subtle bit of colour to the circles.

Once the embossing had cooled I gave the LO a very light spray of white mist and then teal. Wiping the residue from the embossed areas with a bit of kitchen towel.

Tomorrow I will be back with three more LOs using the same 3 sketches in a different way.
Please feel free to use the sketches to inspire you, and if you do drop a link to your blog/gallery in the comments box so I can come and have a look and leave you a comment.

Back soon