Cardboard Box.

Hello fellow scrappers!

Finally there is an end in sight for the recent spate of DIY and I am looking forward to wearing clothes that are not paint splattered! Although now Spring is officially here and the allotment is a calling, I will be swapping them for mud splattered ones!

In the meantime I had a spare few hours last night to finish off a couple of layouts that I started a while ago. I have one to share today for the scraplift challenge over at Amanda's blog.

Here is Amanda's page that she has challenged us to lift.

And here is my take on her page, staring the ever so cute Ginger having a fun time living in a cardboard box! My girls were playing with him through the holes in the banana box and it was so funny seeing his paw shoot out of the holes after a paint brush that was being brushed along the sides!

A little cluster of labels, stickers and wooden heart.

I layered these tags to place my title on.

Hope you like my take on the lift and will play along too. All the details can be found on Amanda's blog HERE.

Thanks for stopping by and hope to be back soon.

Until then have a great week. xx

Cloud Nine..

I am pleased to be able to share with you my fabulous news, I have been commissioned to create scrapbook layouts for the Docrafts Creativity Magazine. A UK based magazine that provides inspiration for all manner of crafts like card making, scrapbooking and cake design!

When an email came out of the blue from the editor you could have knocked me over with a feather! 

Due to publishing rules I haven't been able to share my first layout (which appeared in the January/February issue) until now. 

Here is my first ever commission!

I was given a brief to base my design around circles and provided with their Papermania Craft Christmas papers but asked to make a non Christmas layout with them.

This picture of my youngest with a cute sweater on was perfect for the brief.

I am only allowed to use their products so had to get creative with what I had been sent. 

I added some glitter behind the tag at the top for a bit of sparkle.

My title was hand drawn with the help of stencils then fussy cut.

Luckily for me a couple of the papers were perfect for cutting the designs out to use for embellishments.

And just to prove the layout was indeed published here is the double page feature!

I have to provide the write up about how to re-create my layout too and I have to tell you that's the hardest part! You have to stick rigidly to the word count and it's always hard to explain your design in just a few words!

As you can see on the right hand page I have to provide a sketch of my layout design too.

But it's getting easier to do the write ups now that I have  provided the magazine with a few projects, it took a while to get my head around the rules set by the copywriters!

Well that's the news that I have been waiting to share with you for month's, the publishing industry has to work so far ahead that it takes ages before what I send to them appears in the magazine (this one was sent in last November!).

Enough ranting from me.

Hope you have a day sprinkled with glitter!

Hugs

Kerry. xx

Lap of Love.

I am delighted to be Guest Designer over at Pixels and Paper Challenge Blog this month especially as I got to design a layout based on their gorgeous inspiration photo for March.

Here it is! 

I loved the glitter shoes, although there is no way I could walk even a few steps in those heals! 

How cute is that suitcase too? I think that whoever it belongs to needs a lesson in packing though - her clothes will be so crumpled by the time she gets to her destination! 

Here is my layout.

The suitcase full of clothes inspired me to use the photo of my daughter and our cats snuggled under piles of pillows and blankets!

The heart background was cut on my Silhouette and made a great backdrop to the photo and went with the theme of the title.

I used some red glitter chipboard letters to represent the sparkly shoes.

I hand stitched the circles and incorporated some sequins for more shine!

I used Teresa Collins papers for this layout, fussy cutting and punching some to make my embellishments.

One last little close-up.

I do hope the photo inspires you to play along with this months challenge at Pixels and Paper. 

To see the design teams take on this challenge head on over to the Pixels and Paper blog HERE.

Thanks for popping in. xx

Waiting In Line.

Hello dear crafty friends, hope your weekend is going just great and for those of you in the UK - Happy Mother's Day!

Whilst I'm here I wanted to share the Sketch N Scrap mid-month sketch challenge with you.

Here is Kelly's awesome sketch.

Due to the orientation of the photo's I wanted to use I flipped the sketch on it's side.

The pic shows my girls and their friends on holiday waiting in line for tickets to travel to the top of a mountain by cable car. Obviously not what we wanted to be doing but they were making the best of it and allowing me to take silly photo's!

These cute papers are a really old line by Fancy Pants, I think they were a Valentine design.

I HAD to fussy cut these birds as they went with the theme of the page with them all sitting on a line.

They were printed all across the top of one of the sheets of paper. Not anymore!

Now it's your turn to play with Kelly's sketch and create a work of art for your album.

Hop on over to the Sketch N Scrap blog for inspiration from the DT.

Here is the link. 

Happy weekend. xx

Friendly Challenge - Photo.

Last year my dear crafty friend Sue celebrated her 60th birthday with a big party, 

I attended with another couple of scrappy gals and whilst there we had our photo taken together.

Of course with us all being scrapbookers a challenge was inevitable!

I got each of us a 5x7' copy of the lovely photo as I thought that we don't often scrap with the larger size and that would add to the challenge.

Then when we got together on a Saturday crop and we all scrapped the photo so that we could see each others take on the challenge (and I could get some photo's to share with you!).

Here is the gorgeous photo we had taken. From the left - Helen, Birthday Girl Sue, Jackie and lastly on the right lil ole me! 

Look at those smiles!

Here is the page I created using the photo and we all decided on the title of Celebrate too.

All sorts of lovely things on my page as it's all about the us girls dressed up and ready to Party!

Gotta have a doily and fussy cut flowers. 

I tried to arrange the cotton that I tied onto my tag into a heart shape - a bit on the wonk but I think the general shape is there!

I even managed some stitching and STAMPING on my layout!

On to the other layouts and Birthday Girl Sue's gorgeous page using some very pretty patterned papers behind the photo, lots of hearts for our lovely friendship and a smattering of buttons.

Helen's layout, she picked out the limes and purples from the photo for the colour scheme of her page. Some creative stitching, pretty purple flowers and a doily for the feminine touches!

Jackie also used a lime/purple colour scheme but with a kraft background. She got creative with Zentangle doodles, fussy cut flowers and stamping.

Why not get together with your crafty friends and challenge yourselves too. It's great fun to see everyone's take on a photo or sketch, each of you will have your own style so no two layouts will be the same!

Thanks so much for dropping by.

Hugs,

Kerry. xxx

A Friendly Challenge - Frames.

I have posted about a couple of friendly challenges lately and still have another one to share after this one. I love to set them with my crafty friends, it is such fun to see the different takes that each of you come up with even with the same papers or sketch.

During an evening at the local craft club that I run, we were having a night where we were sorting through old papers to make decisions about whether or not to keep them. Some got swapped amongst each other and there were plenty of 'does anyone like this one?' or 'I don't think I would ever use this one'. So when my friend Jackie said 'what could you do with this sheet?' about this one particular piece of patterned paper I loved it so much I challenged her to scrap it with me (there were two sheets of it as it came out of a paper stack).

Here is the sheet in question, I can't remember the name of the stack but I'm sure some of you will recognize it.

Here is the result of me cutting the living daylight out of it!

I just used the frames as little embellishments and then added flowers butterflies etc all around them.

I have had these butterflies for many years but they had never really 'gone' with anything before. The colours in my photo and the dark paper behind it meant that these fluttery embellies we perfect for this page.

I mounted the frames on the page using 3D foam pads to give some dimension.

I was pleased with how my page turned out - nice and girly, just how I like them!!!! 

At first Jackie was stuck with how to use her sheet of paper, I think the fact that there were too many frames for her liking was putting her off. So when she decided to cut some of them out it made it a lot easier for her to work with.

Unfortunately I forgot to take any close ups when photographing her page but I think you can see where she used her frames. I loved the fussy cut camera  inside one and can you see the frame on the bottom left - it has some keys tied to the bottom of it!

There we are, another great challenge successfully completed and I can't wait to share my next friendly challenge with you as there are four of us using the same photo!

Thanks for taking a peek at my little blog.

Hugs

Kerry. xxx 

 

Dashing Through The Day......but first

Hello, Hello, Hello!

I really am dashing today so I am here to quickly post the Birthday card I created using the first card sketch of the month over on the Sketch N Scrap blog.

Here is the lovely sketch designed this time by Kelly Holifield.

I found some glittery balloon paper whilst searching what to use as a background for my card and remembered that I had an itty bitty balloon die I could use with it.

The sentiment is my favorite one from Paper Smooches.

A quick close up of the balloons cut from glitter card and to give them dimension I simply made some little reflective bits (I'm sure there is a name for them!) to make them look curved..

Well I told you I was just dashing in, off to take my girls to school before starting on the washing (big yawn!).

Don't be shy, hop on over to the Sketch N Scrap blog to see the rest of the examples from the DT.

The link is HERE.

Catch you later. xx 

Just The Two Of Us.

Good morning, afternoon, evening, depending on where in the world you are reading this from!

It is my pleasure to be Guest Designer at XOXO Scrapbooking this month and I have submitted a layout for the March Scraplifting Challenge.

With triangles being the 'in' shape at the moment I created a layout for XOXO Scrapbooking that incorporated a couple of different sizes and a variety of papers from Pink Paisley.

The photo's are a couple of years old and feature me and hubby alone in a tiny little bay in Ibiza that could only be accessed by swimming around from the beach next door. My girls are competent swimmers so they had gone off to explore around the rocks you can see in the background of the photo. Leaving me and Gary with a little alone time to take photo's of our feet!!!!!

Ok, you all know me too well by now so yes all these flowers and flourishes were cut from the patterned paper with a cute flair badge thrown in for good measure.

I would love for you to play along with us at XOXO Scrapbooking and it would be so much fun to see you scraplift my layout.

So embrace the triangles and maybe even the fussy cutting!

As usual the challenge is open until the end of  the month, the link to the XOXO blog is HERE.

Lovely to see you again.

Thanks for stopping by. xxx 

Friendly Challenge, Glue Masks.

A very warm Hello to you and welcome to another friendly challenge reveal.

Helen and I have been challenging each other for............... OMG I just went to check when we started our friendly challenges and it turns out the first one was to scrap a piece of Basic Grey paper way back in 2009!! Here is a link to our first ever challenge and if you go to look no laughing at our early scrapping skills! 

Ok now you have gotten off the floor and stopped laughing, onto last month's challenge which was set by Helen. She came across this tutorial on Pinterest about how to make masks with your hot glue gun (and lot's of glue in my case!).

After much deliberating about what design I was going to make with my glue, I found the process very easy. I went for a rose design as I had a new Sizzix rose die that I had yet to play with and a romantic layout to scrap.

Here is my completed mask, almost a 12 x 12 in size and lots of sticks of glue later!

And here is the effect it made after spritzing.

Last summer we visited Paris for the day whilst staying at Disneyland and we came across this bridge that has for years been the place for lovers to attach a padlock to 'seal' their love and then both sets of keys would be then thrown in the river! The right photo just shows the back of the railings that doesn't do justice to the amount of padlocks on the front but I couldn't get a decent photo of the front as there were too many people.

Here is what the bridge looks like from the front. (source)

Unfortunately part of the railings collapsed from the weight of the padlocks last September so the city is trying to find alternative ways for people to show their love. 

I recently bought some awesome wooden words from The Works and the 'love' one was perfect for part of my title.

This is one of the rose die's from a set of three that I got in the Sizzix sale.

All my papers were Fancy Pants, I think they were the Hopscotch line.

I absolutely loved Helen's glue masks, as you can see she created these three paw print ones that she could place around her page. Making these smaller ones means that in the future she can place them next to each other to make a border or place one or more together to make a larger mask. 

What a clever crafter! 

And here is Helen's masterpiece! Of course having paw print masks could only mean one of her pets would be the star of the show and today it is Odie. I adore Helen's colour combo with the dark teal and turquoise then a smattering of salmon pink. Gorgeous!

A close up of the paw masks effect. Just too cute and lucky for me Helen cut some paw borders on her Cricut for me to use as a template to make my own paw mask after I buy more glue!

Close up of the layered flower with a lovely gem brad in the center and placed on a doily. 

Well, there we are another friendly challenge completed and the next one is a craft bingo (or tic tac toe as we say in the UK).

Hope you enjoyed seeing our different layouts and masks and do let us know if you have ever had a go at making a glue mask. We would love to see more examples for ideas on this sticky technique!

Until next time. xxx

Explore Your World.

I know I probably say this every month BUT where did last month go?

It's March already and not only are we still decorating like mad at home but this month heralds the start of the new growing season at my allotment and in the garden!

No rest for the wicked (and I'm really wicked!).

Anyway on with the show, I have lots of layouts to share but today's has to be the new sketch challenge over at Sketch n Scrap! 

This superb sketch by Lisa Hidy needed to be scrapped even though I am not on not on her team and wasn't required to contribute!

My photo's had the perfect orientation for the sketch, which doesn't happen often! And I found some delightful papers that matched my photo's - what more could a scrapper ask for? 

Demi seems to be staring in several of my layouts lately and I can't wait to get outside in the garden with a camera as she is my little shadow! 

Fussy cut flowers and a doodled flourish.

The flower/tag cluster was repeated at the bottom too.

I mounted a word sticker onto a banner and then just layered it with another circle sticker and a flower for the last little bit of interest.

Basically I stuck to the sketch as I liked it so much.

I would love for you to join in with me and Sketch N Scrap with this wonderful sketch challenge.

All the details of how to play can be found on the Sketch N Scrap blog HERE. 

Hope to be back tomorrow with mine and Helen's friendly challenge from February.

See you soon. xx