The Face Says It All!

With the arrival of  some goodies from Sarah's Cards I set to work on the My Minds Eye December Sketch Challenge which I have been meaning to find time for amid all the Christmas arrangements.

Here is the sketch, designed by Ronda Palazzari and her take on it is fantastic. You can check it out HERE. 

 

I know what you're saying, "not another holiday page" but I am determined to scrap them and not give up half way like I have done on other albums.

My eldest daughter is trying a shot of some foreign alcohol and as you can see by the photos she was quite eager to have a go but it fell short of her expectations!

All the patterned papers are from 'The Sweetest Thing' collection by MME with some crepe paper under all the layers.

 

Amongst the papers I received was this fab washi tape that I couldn't resist buying and couldn't wait to use. I can see it featuring on many a layout in the future.

Last but not least is the close up of the bottom corner cluster where I used up a really old chip board circle. Sometimes I wonder why I keep hold of stash (in case I want it for something else) and then end up keeping it for far too long, when I could be making room for new items! I feel a New Year's Resolution in the making!

Thank you so much for popping by my lil ole blog and if you are reading this before Christmas I wish you a great one. XXX

December Sketch Challenge.

The month would not be complete without having entered Sarah's Cards sketch challenge and this month's sketch is right up my street. Especially when I spotted the page one of the DT members, Ifa created for the challenge. Ifa had turned the sketch on it's side and turned what I would initially say would be the patterned paper into where she put her photo's. Check out her page HERE.

Here is the sketch for December.

 

What I did with the sketch was to pull those four strips down and replace them with photo's as well but also kept the large photo.

The page is for my summer holiday album and shows the wild cats that were around the villa we stayed in. Of course the villa instructions were NOT to feed the cats but you try telling eleven cat lovers that! We were only there for a week and by the end of it we were besotted by the kittens antics and the very sweet pregnant tabby.

We are returning next summer so hopefully we we see some familiar furry faces!

 

My usual close ups of the clusters on the page, loving my nestabilities heart dies at the moment.

Hopefully I will be back with another page before Christmas but if not have a great time and have fun with your new crafty goodies from Santa.

The End of The World?

I had arranged for a day with my friend Helen and it wasn't until last week that I realised that we were getting together on 'the end of the world' day! But I thought it would be a lovely 'way to go' scrapping and eating delicious food and let's not forget the great company. Luckily we all survived to scrap another day!
So now I can reveal our challenge to each other which was different ways of using shrink plastic on our pages.

So here is my page of my youngest daughter and her school friends during this years charity week.

The papers I used are all from Crate Paper.

 

The first things I made with my shrink plastic were these banners with their names stamped on.

I also made some buttons and backed them with some of the patterned paper I used on the page.

Now this stunning page is Helen's showing her eldest daughter in her prom dress.

The only patterned paper she used is the background sheet!

 

Helen has made the sweetest little butterflies with her shrink plastic which were coloured in with markers and shaped whilst still warm.

Some little stamped flowers are perfect for the middle of her crepe paper flowers.

And last but certainly not least a shot of the bling with it's butterflies and extra little flowers.

I hope you enjoyed seeing another of our friendly challenges and the next one we have set is to scrap a photo/s that we will take over the Christmas Holidays.
I will be back tomorrow with a page for the challenge over at Sarah's Cards blog, so see you then. X

 

 

Bonus Sketch.

We have a bonus sketch for you to play along with at Sketch N Scrap this month and this time it was our new sketch designer Brenshevia who inspires us.

Here is the sketch for our third and final challenge not only for December but for 2012!

Here is my take on Breshevia's sketch which I shrank down to 8x8 and then had a big border with elements spilling out into it. I took my colour inspiration from the orange flowers on my DD's t-shirt and the papers all came from a Crate Paper stack.

 

You will have to excuse the lack of journaling but I have yet to find the details for the photo's from our external hard drive. But they are from a holiday in England showing my middle DD enjoying the fantastic playground we found.

A lastly a close up of the embelly cluster at the top making use of my Nestabilities heart dies and some black sequins my daughter had discarded from a craft set. (waste not).

Now there are two prizes up for grabs this month and three chances to win with our three fab sketches, so if you have time to join us which sketch will you choose? You have until 30th Dec to enter and the winner will be announced on Jan 2nd 2013. All the details are HERE.

 

Christmas 2004!

Wow, talk about behind with the times. Everyone else seems to be scrapping this years Christmas photo's of their tree's, trimmings or cute pictures of their kiddos with 'Santa'. Not me though I am way behind with my Christmas scrapping mostly because I have trouble liking the photo's that I took at past Christmas's, what with the messy look to them and too many colours.
But when I was lucky to have this layout picked for a prize with the fab Sketchbook365 I decided to use the colourful papers to enter a layout in their December sketch challenge.

 

Here is the fantastic prize that I received, the Christmas line from Kaisercraft called Mint Twist.

  

 

This is the sketch challenge for December and there was a piece of die cut paper in amongst the papers that was perfect for this.

 

 

All the baubles hanging down were die cut so I added some glitter card to the back of the page.

Look how little my girls are in this photo! Can't believe how time flies and how much they have grown. I can no longer get them to wear Christmas dresses like these any more either!

 

A close up of those baubles and can you see the tiny glitter confetti that I painstakingly cut out with my hole punch that I use for my eyelets? (seemed a good idea at the time but took forever).

I used a few of the many die cut pieces and added more confetti and strips of paper to the large tree to give it a bit of sparkle.

This page was so easy to put together because of the amount of elements I had to play with and maybe it will encourage me to scrap more of my Christmas photo's rather than only using seasonal papers to make cards.
Sketchbook365 has great challenges and wonderful prizes so go check out their blog HERE.

 

 

 

 

  

A Day Late.

Hi everyone and welcome to my post for the new sketch challenge (number 23) at Sketch N Scrap. I am running a day late with the posting as I went for a day trip to France on the Channel Tunnel yesterday (new experience for me).
So without further delay here is the sketch that was designed by the talented Lisa ...

....and here is the page that I put together for the DT reveal.

As you can see I turned the sketch on it's side because I was using landscape photo's and I found the perfect papers to go with the theme of the photo's and the colours too (American Crafts of course).

 

 

The title fitted just right in the space between the larger circles on the paper where I had added buttons to make the title look like it was spinning around them and to anchor the letters.

Using my Nestabilities I cut lots of circles as my embellishments and then added some cute brads in the middle.

The Sketch N Scrap team would love to see your interpretation of this month's sketches, there will be three this month with the third one being on the 20th of December and will be designed by our new sketch designer Brenshevia. WE have also got two prizes up for grabs so if you have time amongst all your Christmas chores to play with paper and glue why not enter one of our challenges and be in for a chance of winning one of the prizes.
So pop over to the Sketch N Scrap blog for all the details.

Fun for Hire.

I'm back with another double page for my holiday album and this was done using a challenge for the Bradfield Craft Club of BLUE, MORE THAN ONE PHOTO and TAG/S.
As usual you need to click on the image to get a close up.

We had hired a couple of pedalo's (there was no way 11 of us could fit on just one and still be sea worthy) and the girls had so much fun jumping off, sliding down and swimming from them. It is definitely on our to do list for next years holiday.

The usual glitter card title and you can just see the tag in the background.

 

I cut up some of the gorgeous flowers from the paper to make the embellishments.

 

I am currently working on pages that need to be done for assignments in December/ January as my craft stash gets put away to make room for a big tree! But I will try and get some other challenge pages done before that happens.

Thanks for stopping by. 

Vellum Challenge.

Last Friday was spent crafting and chatting with my great friend Helen and as always we had set a challenge for each other and this time it was to use vellum on our pages.

Here is my double page, you may have to click on the image to get a better look. The photo's show some of the glorious flowers that we saw on our trip to the Eden Project last year. I have mounted the photo's on some white vellum to give a subtle frame.

 

I stamped this butterfly onto some light brown vellum.

 



The leaves were die-cut from some green vellum.

 



This is Helen's page and she has used blue vellum to make a hot air balloon. Click on the image to see the stitching detail and the cute clouds. Her photo's are from a hot air balloon trip over Florida.

 

Helen had a gorgeous paper stack that she has used with lots of cut-outable images and beautiful colours. (sorry forgot to get the name of it).

These glitter letters come with the paper stack too and I swooned over them as I am quite into doodling at the moment.

Hope you liked looking at our pages and our next challenge to each other is to use shrink plastic! I need to put my thinking cap on for this one.

See you soon as I have another page to show you, I just need some sunlight to get the photo's taken, don't hold your breath, this is the British winter!

 

 

December!!!!

Ok, usually the start of December fills me with dread as I have always got so much to do still with the preparations for Christmas. But I have a silver lining this year with today being the first sketch at Sketch N Scrap with the new Design Team which as you know includes me now (happy face).
So drum roll please.......................

Here it is - sketch 22 and the first of three sketches for December as we have an extra sketch reveal on the 20th with a sketch from the new sketch designer Brenshevia.

I am carrying on with my holiday photo's (yes I did take alot) and I used another home made mask for the background circle using double masking. I was in a doodling frame of mind the day I made this page so out came the black pen to frame the circle and give other elements some definition.

 

This little windmill was made out of some blue vellum that I found in my stash.

 



Waste not, I decided to use the off cuts from the border punch I used here as large confetti.

 



My usual glitter card title (I will grow out of this obsession one day!) and the wonderful banners from Erin Bradley.

 

So what are you waiting for? Pop on over to Sketch N Scrap Blog for details of how to enter our challenge and to see all the wonderful inspiration from the rest of the new larger design team. Can't wait to visit your blog and see what you have done with today's sketch reveal. 

 

Sarah's Cards Challenge.

Well here I am again entering Sarah's Cards challenge by the skin of my teeth, I always seem to think I have plenty of time and then all of a sudden there is two days left to submit! But I made it!
Here is the sketch we had to work with this month and as usual I find their sketches simple enough that you have room to put your own spin on it.

I am still plowing through my holiday photo's but enjoying it immensely.

 

I have kept real close to the sketch because of the photo's I wanted to work with and layered up the title bar at the bottom. The strips of paper around the outside make it look as if I can't take photo's for toffee but they were intentionally put on the wonk it just looks like the photo of the page is distorted! If you click on the photo you will see what I'm rambling on about.

The papers that I used were some really old Crate Paper ones that went perfect with the photo on the left and then I added some black into the mix to bring in the other photo.

 A last little close up of the top right hand corner.

 

I have some more pages finished but am running out of time today, so I will be back soon to share them with you.

Have a great day. 

New Design Team Member.

Great news today, I have won a place on the design team for the wonderful Sketch~N~Scrap challenge blog from December to June.
I am thrilled and excited to be part of their new larger design team and look forward to playing with their sketches alongside some very talented ladies.






I hope you will join us with the challenges which are posted on the 1st and 15th of the month as we would love to see how our sketches inspire you.

Creative Scrappers Sketch 233.

Here I am back with another holiday page and this time the challenge is for Creative Scrappers sketch number 233 (I'm a bit behind).

The photo shows us outside the villa that we hired that was called Can Baso and I took my inspiration from the colours in the photo. The chevrons were cut and then placed inside a large Polaroid-ish frame.

 

The flowers were cut out by hand and I was in two minds as to whether or not I should colour them in but my skill with a felt tip leaves a lot to be desired and they go really well with the white/ grey of the drive in the photo.

A couple of close-ups of some of the other elements on the page.

 

Here is sketch 233. 

 Hop on over to Creative Scrappers if you don't already follow them as they have some amazing sketches and wonderful inspiration each week.