Friendly Challenge - No Trimmer!

Hello there scrappy friends, for those of you in the UK I hope your Bank Holiday has been fabulous (of course it rained!). I had organised a day crop on Saturday, sadly had to be cancelled but luckily for me I had also arranged to visit my dear friend Helen on Friday. 

We shared the layouts from a challenge I had set, which was to create a layout without the use of our paper trimmers!

My layout was based on punched circles cut in half taking inspiration from the macaroons in the photo.

The only cutting tools I used were circle punch, craft knife and my trusty scissors!

The papers I used are all from July's kit at Like Forever. 

The bottom corner embellishment cluster.

I doodled around all the half circles to make them stand out more.

Top corner.

Helen's layout featuring a very young self.

Helen's cutting tools were craft knife and heart die with added ripping!

Helen used a couple of wooden embellishments (the heart and the word Happy) which she painted to co-ordinate with her layout.

These flowers look beautiful with sequin centers.

For her background Helen used a combination of water colour, stamping and ink splats.

Hope you enjoyed our latest challenge, our next one is a sketch from good old Pagemaps.

Helen and I had been chatting on Facebook before Friday and we were saying that we couldn't get the background effects that we wanted from water colour and Helen asked me about using Gelato's.

So we decided to spend our day experimenting with different techniques.

First of all we tried plain water colour paper with a wash of water.

We painted onto this watered down Gelato's, Distress Inks, water colour paint and Cosmic Shimmer mists to see which one gave the best effect.

We decided that the paper absorbed the paints/mists too quickly. 

So then we tried coating the watercolour paper with white acrylic paint and the difference was amazing, we could layer the paints to create more of the background effect we were looking for.

Change of tactic here using plain cardstock, mist splats and water spritzing.

Plain cardstock and and splats of really watered down water colour paint.

Acrylic paint covered cardstock, splats of watered down Gelatos. This worked ok but you could clearly see the brush strokes from the acylic paint. 

Acrylic paint covered cardstock, then Gelato's drawn straight onto it and misted.

The Gelato's didn't dissolve very well and I needed to smudge with my fingers to blend with the water better. Again you could clearly see the brush strokes from the acylic paint. 

Plain cardstock, splats of watered down Gelatos and large salt grains sprinkled on. Left to dry before rubbing off the salt. Helen tried this with mists instead of Gelatos but the salt grains didn't show as well.

My least favourite effect - Cosmic Shimmer on plain cardstock then misted straight away with water.

One of Helen's favourites - really watered down watercolour paint on plain cardstock. 

First she brushed the paint on then added splats of it to soften the edges.

My favourite was plain cardstock with a water wash first then misted and splattered with Cosmic Shimmer mists.

We also discovered that the different heat guns used to dry the examples made a difference to the end result.

Helen's heat gun used heat and air and mine used just heat.

Helen's heat gun was much more effective at moving the wet paint around and drying it quicker.

Normally we wouldn't spend hours testing paints and techniques to find out the different effects and it was so useful and fun to play for hours on end with paint.

Please excuse the long post today but I wanted to share these with you as well as having a way of checking back on the techniques and effects that came out of the day.

Enjoy your week.

Thanks for stopping by.

Hugs,

Kerry. xx  

Snap Happy.

Happy Monday crafty friends!

I have been playing with my Silhouette today and doing a little scrapping, definitely a Happy Monday for me!

I finished a layout today that I am entering into Scrap The Girls August mood board challenge.

Here is the mood board and what a beautiful selection!

When I saw the mood board I knew I had to play along but I didn't have any salmon pink papers so I had to choose papers with a more pink than salmon shade.

I created a double page as I just couldn't leave any of the photo's out!

The photo's show my girls and their friends taking selfie's whilst waiting for the cable cars to take us up a mountain in France last summer.

A close up of the left page. 

All the papers are part of the Heidi Swapp Hello Today line. 

The right hand side with more fussy cut flowers from the paper stack.

just a few more close up's.........

Hope you enjoyed seeing my take on the mood board (if loosely!).

For all the details on how to play along this month with Scrap the Girls check out their blog HERE.

Thanks for dropping by and I hope you had a lovely Monday too. xx

My first kit!

Hi, I am excited today as I can share a couple of layouts that I have made using my first kit from Like Forever Kit Club that I joined last month.

I have never subscribed to a kit before as I worried that they would not be to my taste. Then I heard about Like Forever, looked into it, bombarded the owner with lots of questions and took the plunge!

Here are the contents of the kit, papers and embellies from Pink Fresh Studios.

I ordered a couple more sheets of some of my favourite papers but no other add-ons.

And here is a layout using the kit. 

The Rustic Triangles/Happy Things paper to the left of the page is my favourite of all the papers and the acetate triangles are such fun!

The bird and cloud were cut from the Big Dream,Happy Things sheet of paper. Others will probably be shocked that I ruined a whole sheet of paper just for the cute birdie but I struggle scrapping with those types of papers so I was happy!

I cut the word Summer for my title with my Sihouette in white and re-coloured it with a Promarker to give it the same distressed effect as the patterns in the papers.

I created a tag and fussy cut the leaves from a couple of other papers.

This layout incorporates some of my own stash. The pink cardstock matched the colour in the patterned paper perfectly and the Lovely Day card was cut from another sheet. 

I was really pleased how this embellishment cluster turned out. Sometimes I struggle to group embellishments together and it can be quite frustrating! The Flair badge is from the kit but the rest is stash.

  

The packet of wooden shapes in the kit are just adorable!

I designed the title and cut it out in gold card with my Silhouette. I would one day love to be able to share my cut files with you and as soon as I get chance I will look into websites that allow this - unless you can recommend any?

As I have been away on holiday my Like Forever kit has not had much play time and this months is due to drop through the letterbox this Friday so I hope to get time to cut into this one a bit more this week.

Thanks for stopping by today. 

Hugs,

Kerry. xxx

I'm Back!

Hello scrappy friends! 

I have been conspicuous by my absence here lately as I have been on holiday in the South of France for two weeks. Then of course there is the manic preparations before you leave, the unpacking, washing and catching up to do when you come back - making it nearly a month since I have blogged.

Here are a few things we got up to on holiday.

Canoeing down La Dordogne river near Bergerac. 

Didn't meet another soul until the pick up point!

Taking in the beautiful old towns. This one is Bergerac.

Beach combing.

Surf School.

Meeting the locals!

I  hope to be back soon with some actual scrapping to share. I managed to get a couple of layouts done last night with the kit from the Like Forever Kit Club that I joined last month. 

So great to be cutting and gluing again!

See you soon. xxx