Shaping Up - A Friendly Challenge.

Hiya scrap friends!

Loving this summer weather, sitting outside in my friend Helen's craft cabin yesterday, doors wide open and chatting away about anything and everything was a real treat.

Typical British weather though - brilliant sunshine for a few hours then it started to rain! But don't you love a summer rain shower to freshen the garden and to listen to the patter of it on the cabin roof?

I am always glad of a bit of rain in the summer as we live in a dry part of England and my garden and allotment can always do with it. But although it was raining at Helen's when I got home - not a drop to be seen and I live only about 12 miles away! So I will be going out to water my pots in a little while!

Before I go I have mine and Helen's friendly challenge to share with you. This month it was all about shaped patterned background paper! I have several in my stash and I decided that I needed to use them or lose them so I challenged Helen to use up one of her's too! 

I had about six circle ones in different levels of brightness but chose to start off with an easy one! I think this one is an old Bella Boulevard one (but don't quote me on it!) Just to shake it up a bit I decided to cut through it and place the two pieces on opposite sides of the white card stock (I live life in the fast lane!).

I am really enjoying putting bunting (banners) on pages at the moment so I made one using an assortment of patterned and plain papers.  

I recently treated myself to some thin cork and had fun cutting out some shapes for this page.

I also found some pastel sequins and got some green, yellow and blue ones to go with my summer pages. You can see the blue ones here.

Helen also chose a circle shaped paper to play with which is the perfect choice for the sweet photo of her eldest daughter (who is now 19!). The papers that went with it are so cute with the woodland animals and trees.

Helen uses circles to cluster her embellishments on and I have now stolen that idea as you can see in my layout! She has been using this technique for years and I have now decided to adopt it but first I will admit to where I got the idea from - thanks Helen!

Helen is a woman of many talents - some of which I don't think here is the place to mention them! But one of these talents is making adorable crochet flowers and the glitter brads look so cute in the middle of these ones!

I do hope you enjoyed this month's friendly challenge and Helen has chosen our next one which is to use Fimo clay! I have used it once on a page - I cut out a heart and stuck it on - go me! So I am going to try and find some more exciting ways to use it for this challenge. Pinterest here I come!

Love it that you stopped by. Have a great weekend whatever you are up to. xx