Embellishing your Chistmas!

If you're as unorganised as me, it's that time of year when any spare cash is being plunged into (starting!!) your Christmas shopping, and the odd festive scrapbooking treat for yourself may well be pushed to the back burner. With that in mind, I decided this month to choose just a few brand new select seasonal embellishments that I could easily mix in with paper and other bits already in my stash, so as not to break my budget and to help me feel good with a bit of stash busting.

I plumped for the gorgeous Sleigh Ride vellum embellishments from Crate, a star mask and some tin badges from Studio Calico....and then, as you can see from the picture below, ever a slave to my patterned paper addiction, I crumbled when I saw the sweet "Rudolph" paper in the Crate collection!

The first page I made with my goodies records a recent "Santa Jog" my fiance and I took part in for the British Heart Foundation. I started my love-hate relationship with running earlier this year when I embarked on the C25k programme, and although I still can't profess to being able to run 5k yet, I really have developed by running ability more than I thought I ever would and it has helped me to loose 24lbs so far. My commitment to the programme does dip when I find it challenging - so my "darling" other half entered my into the Santa Jog without me knowing as a way to step up training efforts!

Click on the picture for a larger image

I began by using the rear of the Rudolph paper as my base - I loved the geometric tree pattern in pale ice blue. Wanting to get those cute deers in on the action - I popped a slice along the bottom of my page. I love that scrapping in A4 allows me to use a patterned paper as my base sheet and still have some left over - especially when they are gorgeous double sided designs like this.

I layered lots of the vellum tags on top of each other to create an area where my title would go - I loved that their translucent nature allowed the patterns to still subtly show through. The map tag was a must for my running themed page! For my title itself, I used some of the lovely letter stickers from the Echo Park Photo Freedom sticker sheet I used last month (read the blog post here). I created the date using a December sticker from the same sheet, and the one of the vellum numbers that are in the pack from Crate. 

You may notice a little silver star peeping out from behind the photo. I had a go at using the star mask and sweeping some Liquid Pearls through it. It was a little hit and miss; if you pulled the mask of too soon the pearls would pool into a blob, and if you left it on too long, the pearls would pull away with the mask and take a little of the paper with it too. But it was fun to try something a little different. I simply taped the mask into place, squeezed a little Liquid Pearls through each hole, and then swiped over it with an old store card.

 I topped each up as needed until the Liquid Pearls was flush with the top of the mask.

Underneath my picture I popped a row of punched hearts to represent the charity that organised the event. I punched them from some Kraft, but felt they needed something a little extra. So I took a scrap of card, and covered it with some washi tape. I added the strips at an angle as I wanted the striped to be reminiscent of candy canes.

After trimming the rough edge so it would fit, I popped it through the same heart punch.

This gave me a strip of candy-cane striped hearts. I cut a few free from the chain with a small scissorsand added them at random to my original strip of Kraft hearts.

 

The final touch to the page was adding some more of the badges to the corner of the page. I used some of the vellum numbers as decorative frames for them - they were the perfect size for the job!

For my second page, I managed to avoid patterned paper completely - a rare thing for me! I decided to use a piece of the delicious new dark Kraft for my base, and the star mask with some white Mister Hueys to create a background. I absolutely love filling the house with candles at this time of year, and wanted to record some of those little pockets of glowing light.

With this in mind, and looking at the "fading" pattern on the mask, where there is a heavy concentration of stars at the bottom and then fading away towards the top; I decided that I would pivot the mask around a point at the centre of the page, to create a pattern that appeared to be "glowing" right from the middle:

I wasn't too concerned about the overlapping marks you can see in the middle - I had three photos and I knew I was going to put them in a triangle formation (like a Christmas tree!) right in the middle so this would be covered. The important thing for me was to create an effect of the stars radiating towards the four corners.

Similarly, I wasn't worried about the untidy misting at edges where the mask hadn't covered (or the punched "nibble" out of the top left corner!), I always have a border to my pages and knew I could cover this up with that. However, this time, rather than mounting my page onto a sheet of card stock for this, I decided to make a border with some lovely wide washi tape. I created neat mitred edges by folding back the tape as you can see in the picture below, making a firm crease as a cutting guide, and then trimming the excess away with a scissors.

With my base completed, I was ready to start on the pretty bits! Here's my finished page:

 For my title, I altered the "Let it Snow"vellum tag to "Glow" using some of the stickers on the second Echo Park Photo Freedom stickers sheet I used in November. I kept the embellishment simple, allowing the photos and the misted background to be the focal point.

A few dotted pearls and wooden stars added a small, festive finishing touch.

Finally, for a very quick make, I whipped up a tag for a special friend:

I misted a scrap of kraft card using the star mask. The concentrated band of colour at the bottom of the tag was card below the edge of the mask that wasn't covered - I loved the contrast between the block of colour and the star pattern so decided to include it when I cut my tag shape, rather than trim it away. A quick strip of washi tape, a tin badge and wooden stars, and hey presto - a hand made tag in minutes.

 

As mentioned by Jen in her post, we can't at present share direct product links with you like we usually do due to the exciting happenings over at the shop! If you haven't already checked out the brand new and totally revamped website at its temporary address - go now!!!

That just leaves me to wish you a very merry Christmas from me, and a happy New Year!

See you in January 2013 xxx

Vanilla Sunshine

Mmmmm as soon as I read the delicious name of this release by SEI (it sounds like some sort of warm, heavenly cake to me!!), I knew I'd have to order some bits and have a play with them! Over the next few days I will be sharing with you a few pages I have made with it, but today I wanted to show you what I did with the gorgeous fabric swatches in the range:

I decided I wanted to make quite a simple page, but use the fabrics as decorative tags that really draw the eye to the details:

You can see how I used the tags to matt my photos here:

I began by choosing a few different fabrics and cutting thm to my desired size. As the fabric is backed by paper, this is really easy and no specialist fabric scisors are needed to cut them. Similarly, they can be stuck with your usual prefered scrapbooking adhesive - I used repo herma. I left the pinking-sheared edge to the bottom of two of the tags to add a bit of interest:

The title of my page was "I Love You Every Day," and I had subtly stamped the days of the week all over my base page with a Versamark pad. I wanted to add this in a more dramatic way also, so, using the same stamp and Stazon ink, also stamped the days of the week randomly over the fabric swatches.

I removed the corners from the top of the "tags" to give them the conventional luggage-tag shape. I also cut a circle from a contrasting pattern, and stuck it to the top of the tag as a reinforcement ring, chomping through both layers of fabric with my cropodile to make the tag hole, throgh which I looped some twine:

My custom tags continue my "everyday" theme, draw the eye to the details of my page and add texture to my layout.

The final tag played host to my title, along with an Ocober Afternoon Little Flyer banner and some Amy Tangerine tape.

What fabric touches will you create for your pages?

I'll be back over the next few days with some more Vanilla Sunshine, plus some tips and tricks for creating popular looks quickly using the good ole square punch - dust them down ready!!

My Supplies Included:

SEi Vanilla Sunshine Sugar Daisies	Vanilla Sunshine Meringue Sunset	Studio Calico Autumn Press Alphas	Vanilla Sunshine Fabric Swatches
OA Little Flyers - Sidewalks	Mister Huey - Clay	Old Fashioned Buttons

InLinkz.com

Patchwork and poetry.

It's the weekend... and it's meant to be a sunny one. Hope you've all got something wonderful planned... if you're planning any scrapping time this weekend, here are a couple of LOs I hope will inspire you.

The first one is a great way to use up bits and pieces of patterned paper... let's face it, we all have lots of paper scraps! After looking at the gorgeous quilts on Sarah's blog, I have ordered a book on quilting from the book people that go to playgroup, but I got to thinking about creating a patchwork LO. After Googling some patchwork designs (how did we ever live without Google?) I really liked some of the complicated circular designs, and after thinking about how I could replicate the designs without too much blood, sweat and tears, I had a brainwave! I raided the kids colouring books cupboard and found some brilliant doodle books with fab designs. After choosing my favourite, I enlarged it to the size I wanted for my LO, and traced it onto my backing paper. I then cut out all the sections with a craft knife... a bit boring, but worth it in the end. I then simply filled each space with a piece of patterned paper or fabric, sticking into place with sellotape.

I really love how it turned out, and will definitely use this technique again.

Now I had a fab patchwork background, but no photo to go with it.... so back to Google to search patchwork quotes. And I found this cute little poem about family being like a patchwork quilt.

I had recently taken a photo of my mum with the boys, and after tinkering with it in photoshop to give it avintage look, it was perfect to use. I wanted the patchwork background to be the main focus of the LO so I kept the rest really simple by matting the photo and adding it to the LO with baker's twine wrapped around the corners to look like they were holding the photo in place, and printing the poem onto a luggage tag.  

The second LO I have to share with you, is a quick and easy peasy one to put together. I used strips of tickets to create a photo mat rather than using them individually like I usually do.

I loved the paper with the fashion models on but it was a bit much to use in large pieces, so I punched details out with a circle punch. Like I said, a really quick and easy LO to put together, so not much more to say about it....

That's all from me folks... watch this space for more projects from the rest of the team throughout the month. And don't forget to look out for the new monthly challenge that will be coming soon.

Have a fab weekend

xxx