Scrap Map

It's time for the new Scrap Map challenge at Creative Craft World and this month I've done a digi page again... mainly because I'm on my hols and a couple of hundred miles away from my craft room! :lol:

 

 

For my page I've actually used some photos of myself! *gasp*

 

As the journalling explains, I'm almost never in photos because I'm always the one behind the camera taking the photos. Plus I usually look awful in photos! :lol:

 

However, when we spent a (gorgeous, sunny) morning at the beach this week, my hubby actually picked up the camera - for once! - and snapped some pictures of me paddling in the sea. And I thought they were perfect for this month's sketch. :)

 

I used a Creative Victorian digikit called Visual.

 

The Scrap Map challenge is lots of fun and so easy to enter - just make your own project using the sketch provided and link it up at the CCW blog for a chance to win yourself a prize.

 

 

Snowy Fun

I felt like crafting tonight... but... it's cold and snowing and I'm tired and the sofa is comfy.

 

So thank goodness for digi-scrapping! :D

 

I took some gorgeous photos of the girls playing in the snow last weekend so decided to use one of them to make this layout:

The paper is from the Watery set of papers by Agnes Biro for Design House Digital, the stitched label is by Gina Cabrera for Digital Design Essentials and all the other elements are from the Winter's Deep kit from Creative Victorian Designs.

 

Get your scrap on! :)

There's no festive project for the Christmas Countdown at Creative Craft World's blog today... because it's Scrap Map Day! :)

 

Yup, once again it's time for a new Scrap Map challenge. It's simple to enter - check out the sketch at the Creative Craft World blog and make a scrapbook page using the sketch as inspiration. Link up your entry to the CCW blog and you could be a winner!

 

Here's my page for this month's Scrap Map:

 

 

I chose these photos of my DD2 stomping around in the garden with her customary determined expression on her face! :lol: I teamed them with a lovely bright pink paper that was a perfect match for the pink of her t-shirt in the photos and cut long pennant strips from coordinating patterned paper. I also made my own bunting using more of the patterned paper and plain white baker's twine. The title is a mixture of alpha stickers and rub-ons and I added jounalling using a white gel pen.

 

Distressed Page

No, not a page that's sad but a scrapbook page made entirely with Distress products! :)

The new Scrap Map challenge is up over at Creative Craft World's challenge blog.

The challenge is simple - just make a scrapbook page using the sketch for inspiration, upload it/pop it on your blog and add your link to the Scrap Map challenge post. You've got till 4 August to enter and you could win yourself a fabby scrapbooking kit and a DT guest spot! :)

Here's the sketch for this month's challenge:

And here's my take on it:

I started with the idea of swiping Distress Stains across the page to make blocks of colour behind the photos, echoing the rectangles on the sketch. I added a bit of texture and interest by dabbing Distress Ink through a stencil of small circles and replaced the large circle in the sketch by dabbing Distress Ink over a decorative mask. I mounted my photos with foam tape for a bit of added dimension and finished things off by doodling frames, a few decorative flowers and some circle borders using Distress Markers. I drew and coloured my journalling and title (cut out and mounted with foam pads) with Distress Markers too. Et voila, a scrapbook page made entirely with Distress! :)

Joy

The monthly challenge over at UKS consists of a one word prompt - Joy. To be interpreted however you choose.

This is what I went with:

I immediately thought of these photos and, by happy coincidence, the colours in the photos went beautifully with the Renewed Spirit digi kit by Agnes Biro/Yellow Butterfly which I had bought recently and was dying to have a play with.

In some ways, this LO is a bit different for me... because I'm in it! :lol: I'm usually the one behind the camera, snapping away, so I don't often appear in the photos that I scrap. And, of course, I look horrendous in these photos! :lol: To be fair though, I had good reason to look awful... I'd been feeling like death warmed over just the day before, due to what was later diagnosed to have been a bout of swine flu(!), and was still dehydrated (as proven by the fact that it took two anaesthetists working together over 20 minutes to get that canula you can see into my flipping hand!!), and I'd been through a very quick, very painful, labour followed by a few hours of poking and prodding and, finally, surgery, to resolve some post-partum complications!

Nevertheless, I decided to scrap these photos - regardless of how awful I look - as, as the journalling explains, the moment these photos capture is one that pretty much sums up the word Joy for me. :)

This LO was made using PSE 10 and all the elements are from the Renewed Spirit kit, except the title and journalling, which are done with fonts installed on my computer (can't recall the font names atm, sorry!). :)

Little Poser

I know all mothers are biased but DD1 really is ridiculously photogenic. She has the most adorable smile and seems to just instinctively strike a pose when the camera comes out. I took this gorgeous photo of her just last week and just knew that I would have to use it on a scrapbook page:

This LO actually combines a couple of challenges. Firstly, the weekly challenge at UKS, for which I had to use a sketch, use stitching, use butterflies and make my own flowers. And secondly the monthly challenge on the little crafting group on the parenting forum I hang out on - for that challenge I had to use green, use a favourite technique or item and recycle something.

The papers are Basic Grey Perhaps (my "favourite item" - I adore BG papers and have a quite silly amount of them, partly cos they're so pretty I find myself reluctant to use them, cos then I won't have them anymore! :lol:) and I punched butterflies using Tim Holtz Movers and Shapers dies and a Stampin' Up! Embosslit. I made the flowers by layering gathered circles of netting, paper blossoms, and Tattered Florals cut from plastic from a packaging box (my "recycled" item) and pearl beads hot-glued into the centre. I also cut more TH butterflies from the plastic packaging and layered them over the paper butterflies on the page.

WOYWW - 29 February 2012

Oohoo, here's we are on leap day Wednesday! So folks, what's gracing your workdesks on this special, extra day?

Here's what's on mine:

I've been a busy little bee tonight (technically, to my mind, it's still Tuesday night cos I've not gone to bed yet(!!) but as it's (well) after midnight, it is in fact Wednesday right now!). I've finished up two little ATCs (seen lurking around at the base of the daylight lamp - more on those in a future post) and I've finally found time to do Shimelle's February "& Now For Something Completely Different" class. The result is the LO you see sitting on my desk. I'm SO pleased with it! :D

The papers are Basic Grey Lemonade and the photos are of DD2. I've followed Shimelle's step by step instructions fairly closely this time around, just making substitutions where I didn't have the stash she'd used. Oooh and I finally got the use some of the washi tape I bought recently! :)

I've got several other projects on the go atm (an in-progress art journal page, a digi CJ page, a mother's day card - ooh it's all go you know!) but for now my next - urgent - project really must be... to go to bed!

So thanks for stopping by and g'night all! :D

Inky fun

The january week 5 challenge over at UKS included a fabulous sketch that I really wanted to have a go at. As well as providing the sketch, the challenge was to use 5 block across the page (could be photos, paper, journalling blocks etc), to add decorative bits along the top and bottom edges (as in the sketch), to use journalling and to use something new.

Here's what I came up with:

I'm really pleased with how this LO came out. I immediately knew I wanted to use these photos... they work really well as a set because they are all of the same subject but each slightly different (this is a photography technique I have developed since having kids (especially when they are babies!) - keep snapping several pics and if you're lucky you'll get a couple where they're looking at the camera/not blurred/not pulling a weird face! :lol:). I also really wanted to use these scrummy brightly coloured flower images that I had recently downloaded from Sweetly Scrapped, and thought they'd be perfect for the decorative bits along the top and bottom of the page (and they also count as my "something new").

To add a bit more interest to the white page, I scraped gesso through a stencil in patches across the middle of the page, behind where the photos would be, and, once dry, spritzed with Dylusions inks. The title was added using glittery alpha stickers and I added a bit of journalling by hand. Et voila.

I really liked this sketch. I may have to use it again.

Simple Recipes

Wow, two posts from me in one day! I'm on a roll! :lol:

I'm also taking part in the Simple Recipes monthly challenge over at UKS and have made this LO for the January challenge:

The challenge inspiration included a delicious hot pink and chocolate colour scheme and also challenged us to use up some stash so I dug out these pink and chocolate papers that I've had sitting around in my stash for, like, forever! :lol:

I spritzed Worn Leather Dylusions spray through a 12x12 mask for the background and then layered my papers and photo and did a bit of stitching (with Bazzill In-Stitchz thread), including stitching on a piece of chocolate coloured lace. I added flowers and chipboard elements and hand-wrote the journalling.

This was a great challenge. Can't wait to see what February's challenge brings.

Crafty Catch-Up

Inbetween my growing anticipation/excitment over the final episode of Sherlock last night (wasn't it *awesome*?!!), I managed to find time to do a teensy bit of crafting over the past couple of days. :)

Firstly I made a quick birthday card for my mum:

I really wanted to have a play with a lovely set of Prima flower masks that I got recently so I picked this design and used stencil glue to stick it onto the card, so as to prevent ink leaking underneath and this losing/blurring detail, and then used Dylusions spray inks over the top. I inked the edges with Tea Dye Distress Ink and then matted onto brown/gold card and inked those edges too. I attached it to the card front and stamped the greeting in Tea Dye DI and then added a little 3D butterfly sticker to finish. Quite a simple design but really pretty. :)

I also found time this weekend to do a quick digi LO for the UKS House Challenge:

I used some of the fab photos I took at our day out to the zoo on Saturday. I went with white space on this LO and used elements from Penny Springmann's 12 Months - June and Claudi Designs' Days of Joy kits.

Scrapbook LOs and another notecard

I've been a busy little crafter lately!

I made this LO for this week's weekly challenge over at UKS:

The challenge was to include:

• 2 photos
• Scraps of paper (not to cut into any fresh sheets of paper but use up scraps instead)
• Bunting
• A stamped image

I claimed full points for this one! :) I hadn't used bunting before, despite it being quite a trend at the moment in papercrafting, and I rather like the results - it was also a good way of using up some scraps of paper!

I also made a LO for the previous week's challenge, which I forgot to upload here:

The challenge that week was to use:

• White (empty) space
• 1 or 2 photographs
• Bling

I didn't have time for physical scrapping that week so I did a digi-LO for the challenge. I claimed full points for this one too.

Finally, I threw together another little notecard yesterday, using masterboard again:

I stamped the card in Smokey Grey Versafine with a Tim Holtz stamp and added a strip of masterboard and then stamped the greeting (a SU stamp) in black Versafine.

Monochrome LO

The monthly challenge over at UKScrappers is to create a monochrome LO using the sketch posted on the homepage.

This was a fun challenge with a great sketch. I went with shades of brown (for the sake of argument, gold is a shade of brown, okay? ;)) for my LO:

I had a rummage through my stash and found this absolutely scrummy gold script paper that I've had lying around for literally years (must be at least six years... it's from a pile of papers that I bought way back when I first started scrapping). It's fairly thin paper so I had to stick it onto cardstock to use it as a background. I used Aged Gold Eco Green acrylic paint behind the matting and the corrugated cardstock and raffia braid added a lovely touch of texture. 

I replaced the 3 smaller photos in the sketch with 3 flowers - I made the flowers (and the little journalling strips) from a sheet of plain brown parcel paper (that I'd bought in order to wrap the giant birthday card for DD1 to post to cBeebies! :lol:). I stamped onto two pieces of parcel paper using my Stampin' Up! En Francais background stamp and the Eco Green paint and on another two pieces of parcel paper I dabbed the Eco Green paint into a Tim Holtz embossing folder, inserted the paper and rolled over the folder with a brayer. I then ran the patterned papers through my BigShot using the TH Tattered Florals die.

The title is made from Thickers painted with Aged Brass Distress Crackle Paint and Making Memories chipboard alphas run through the BigShot with the TH embossing folder and painted with the Eco Green paint.

I'm really rather pleased with how this one turned out. :)

Quick Digi-LO

I don't often do digi-scrapping, partly because playing with stash and getting my hands dirty is a large part of what I love about crafting! :lol: However, the big advantage to digi-scrapping is that I can do it sitting on the sofa in front of the tv, instead of hiding myself away in my craft room!

I really wanted to do a LO for last week's weekly challenge on UKScrappers but the way my week had gone - home alone all week with both the girls and with DD1 really under the weather and grumpy and whingey and clingy - I simply hadn't had time to get in the craft room and work on it. So on Saturday night, while chilling on the sofa with DH and catching up on Season 7 of NCIS, I fired up Scrapbook Factory Deluxe and made this:

The challenge was to include:

• a splash of yellow
• squares
• handmade, crumpled paper flowers
• name of a season in the title

I claimed points for everything except the flowers... although I included flowers in my LO, they weren't exactly handmade! :lol:

Incidentally, the yummy paper and flowers in this LO are from the Beauty kit by Cinzia Loosemore.

Back on the scrapping wagon...

My crafting time is necessarily somewhat limited at the moment... not only have I got a 5 week old baby making demands on my time but also I have my mum coming over for a few days each week (ostensibly to help me out with the kids), both of which means I don't have my entire evenings to myself anymore in which to craft.

My mojo is alive and well and I have a gazillion ideas for things I want to work on - it's finding the time that's the issue! I've found myself leaning more towards cards and ATCs lately as they can be put together fairly quickly - scrapbooking pages take a little longer.

All that said, I have managed to make another LO - only my second one this month! I wanted to join in with the weekly challenge on UKS this week and I managed to find a bit of time last night and again this afternoon to get in my craft room and put this together:

The challenge this week was to include:

• Baby or an animal or something new as the theme;
• The colour red or earth tones;
• A star or planet;
• The word Who in the title or journalling.

I got all of the above in so full points for me! :)

The LO is about DD2 being born on her due date. The papers/journalling spots are xmas-themed Kaisercraft ones that came free with Simply Cards & Papercraft magazine. The chipboard alphas are My Mind's Eye - Dear Santa and the chipboard embellies are Pebbles Chips. I used a white gel pen to scribble frames around the cardstock/papers and a teeny bit of journalling in the bottom corner.

And now I have to go because the subject of the above LO is having a squirm and a grump and probably wanting a bottle! :lol: