The Studio Challenge Sunday 31st October 2010

On 'The Studio' it's a sketch challenge today. Amanda says: 'Today our lovely Sara has created a sketch for us. Most of our DT love sketches, and we know a lot of you guys do too, so we're going to make it a regular feature - the last Sunday of each month will be our sketch Sunday.


But... did you think we wouldn't notice that it's halloween today? Along with the sketch, you need to make your page with a halloween theme! If you don't celebrate halloween where you live then feel free to use a different holiday theme.'

As previously dicussed I don't do Halloween and I'm therefore Halloweened out with my one LO already done :) So I decided to scrap some of last year's Christmas photos that have been sat on the side for the last 10 months waiting to be scrapped. I flipped the sketch upside down so that the title could go in the top left hand corner. I used The Glitter Girls Collection 'Treasured Memories' embossing board to give the LO an embossed edge which I inked to show it off. I also used the board to create the box below the photos. The paper's are My Minds Eye 'So Sophie', which I love.

Precocious Paper

I was delighted to be invited to be part of the Precocious Paper design team and today my first project is on the blog. Check it out!

Tessa sent me some of her yummy flowers that can be bought from her etsy store. I've used two of them so far. The first is on the final Chinese Whispers LO:

( I love the large flower and the great colours)

and the second is on my recent 'Movie Icons' CJ (Part of the Around the Houses Newbie CJ that I'm hosting and playing along with since one of our newbies dropped out). There are some great Haloween flowers in store now, and wait until you see the Christmas range that's coming soon :)

Happy Birthday Baby Boy!

Another year has passed and my little boy is 4 today. I can't believe how quickly that time has gone and how much Connor has changed. Bless him!! Connor has had two parties and two cakes. The first party was with all his little freinds at the local gym club and he wanted a pirate's ship cake. Yesterday we had the family over and Connor wanted a green dinosaur cake and because it was green, it had to be minty :) Notice the K&CO paper hat? Today's challenge on The Studio was this:

"OK, I'm running the risk of scaring all of our followers away this week. It's a toughie, according to majority of the Design Team! For me, who could write until the cows come home, it was not so hard!

Are you ready? Your journalling must take up at least 50% of your scrapbook page."

So I decided to take the opportunity to write Connor a birthday letter.

Scrapbook Magazine Issue 50

I love seeing my work published. I get a buzz when I see a LO somewhere that I've not put it myself. So I jumped at the chance of contributing to the Reader's gallery in Scrapbook Magazine. Only trouble was that the theme was Halloween and I don't do Halloween so at first I had to decline. That very afternoon we went to a friend's house for tea and the Dad of the house offered to do face painting. When Connor was asked what he wanted done he said 'skeleton' out of nowhere! Perfect I thought except that I didn't have my camera with me. Luckily Tony has one of these fancy phones and he was able to take a photo and send it to me.

Have you come across Picasa? It's a free photo editing program from Google and I use it on a daily basis for all my basic fixes. You can rotate by degree, add fill or highlight or shadown, add a tint and lots of other great edits. So I edited the photo in picasa to add some green tints and lighten it all up a bit and went from this:

to this:
I mounted this on some Doodlebug 'Crushed Velvet Cardstock' beetle. So now I had my photo, but I didn't have any papers and a trip to Hobbycraft proved that they'd bypassed Halloween and gone straight to Christmas :( I'm not easily beaten though and I'm resourceful so I decided to make my own Halloween designed paper. I started with a piece of Scenic Route 'Background Blue Grid White' and a piece of safmat. On the safmat I printed some pictures that I found from google images from:
The images were from:
http://www.squidoo.com/PrintableBorders
http://www.leehansen.com/clipart/Holidays/Halloween/index.html
http://www.celebrating-halloween.com/pumpkincarving/spiders-web-pattern.shtml
http://www.clker.com/clipart-9880.html

I found so many free downloadable sites whilst I was doing this search including some great scrapbooking sites with vintage images so I was really chuffed.

The first image of the tree I stuck in the bottom left hand corner. On top of this I stuck a small piece of torn and inked paper from a piece that a friend from America had sent me years ago (New Seasons 'Holiday Scrapbook Set') and an orange ticket that Ifa Zainon sent me for winning a competition on UK Scrappers last year. I used MM coloured staples to attach the ticket too. I cut out a bat shape and stuck that flying away from the bottom corner using foam squares to give it height. Then it was on to the top right hand corner. For this I found a fab spider's web with a dangling spider, which again I printed on to safmat.

I stuck the spider's web on with the spider dangling down beside the photo and the spider web under the photo corner. I took a second piece of the patterned paper (Halloween colours!), which again I tore and inked before tucking it behind the positioned photo (not yet stuck down).

Next it was the full spider's web and spider's turn. Again this was printed on safmat but then I cut it in half. Once I'd peeled the backing off and stuck the spider down, I put the backing on top of the safmat and used Maya Road Glimmer mist from Bubbly Funk. Once I removed the safmat backing the spiders web was clear, but the glimmer mist extended from it.

Now I stuck the photo in position and stapled the top left hand corner with coloured staples again and towards the bottom of the photo also. I took a final piece of the patterened paper and tore and inked it. This was stuck at the bottom of the photo. I printed a row of cats and dancing skeletons on to safmat.

The skeletons were printed small enough to fit on to an orange ticket from my stash from Indigo Mill and the kitty cats were stuck under the patterened paper. I used an orange journalling tag from Elle's Studio 'Chic note tags' and finally I stuck the second half of the spider's web on. Using a black pen I followed the line from the spiders web at the top all the way around the LO.

For the title I found the most Halloweenish colours I had (orange and purple in this case) and stuck them on. They are American Crafts Thickers 'Sprinkles' lavender and
Doodlebug 'Shin dig' Tangerine. I went with the title 'Dem bones, Dem bones' because it's Connor's favourite song right now and has sparked his skeleton fascination. And here is the final LO all complete:

And it's in shops today :)

Getting in to the Christmas spirit

I still have lots of Autumn photos to scrap but on Saturday I received a pizza box of goodies from Bubbly Funk and I couldn't resist getting started on the Christmas products. I love the Christmas goodies but it was the little gingerbread men that really caught my imagination this weekend.

I'm really looking forward to Christmas this year. My son will be 4 years old and he's so aware of what's going on this year. It's going to be so exciting and I can't wait. We've made biscuits for Father Christmas every year (except the first one when he was only a couple of months old and I was still in shock ;) )but I'm not sure he's really 'got it'. This year he will though so I couldn't resist covering this little gingerbread man in Basic Grey paper and added some glitter dots for eyes and buttons.

I found a little box in the charity shop for less than a pound and I covered it in two Basic Grey papers. The edges of the box and the gingerbread men are sanded and then inked with versa. One of the fabby chipboard rectangles from deluxe designs became a great message board and I used some small alphas and an October Afternoon 'gifts' sticker to say 'Biscuits for gifts'. I hand cut some holly to mimic the paper from the green paper and stuck some red buttons on top for berries.

I used glossy accents to stick them to the box.

Autumn- my favourite season

• Cardstock
• Sassafras Mix and Mend – Fancy Free
• Sassafras stickers
• Adorn it- rub on alpha
• My little bit of Whimsy embellishments
• Prima flowers- e line and roosevelt
• Chipboard flowers and leaves
• Buttons
• Ribbons
• Lace
• Chipboard round
• Mist
• MM Coloured staples
• Red string
• MM Panorama tickets
• Maya Road Jonathan chipboard alphabet
• Brown ink
• Acrylic paints; yellow and orange

I love the Autumn. I love the colours; the oranges of pumpkins, the yellows and reds of the leaves. I like the sunny evening walks, kicking up leaves and picking up chestnuts. I tried to capture some of the feel of autumn in my LO that is hot off the press tonight (and therefore captured under awful light and I'll re-do it in the morning).

I started with a piece of Sassafras mix and mend 'fancy free', which I tore to a size about 9x5 before inking the edges with VersaMagic Jumbo Java. I positioned the ribbons and lace and attached them with glossy accents, foam squares and staples. The photo is mounted on a piece of pizza box to give it height, and to allow the prima Rossevelt to tuck behind it.

I tucked a Deluxe design circle base behind the photos and rubbed on the adorn it alphas for my journalling. The 'autumn' in the title is painted with acrylic and once it had dried I inked the edges. I squirted in the top and bottom corner with glimmer mist and inked around the edge of the cardstock. I used glossy accents to stick some red sting on the top corner of the LO and to stick an acorn embellishment as if hanging from it. The chipboard and sticker flowers and buttons are dotted around the LO to give it more depth and interest.

The Studio and Vanilla Sugar

I'm cheating just a little with The Studio Challenge this weekend. The Vanilla Sugar monthly challenge is to create a wall hanging or canvas. The Studio Challenge is

We'd like to challenge you to create a page featuring your home. Maybe your favourite spot, the flowers in your garden, or even the leaking pipes under the bath. Just make it an authentic snapshot of your life right now!

So I created something for my home that reflects what I enjoy about life in my home right now- food :)
This was inspired by my scrappy friend Lisa. I recently visited her house and there were wonderful canvases of her work all around, including one in her kitchen. I love the idea of having my favourite recipes right on hand so I've tucked a few behind the cupcake photo on tags. On some of the tags it just says which book and which page the recipe is on so it's a quick reference guide really :) The 'Recipes' word is from Bubbly Funk and the papers are from Cleo Crafts July kit (MME So Sophie)

A Pagemap LO

The Studio design team jumped at the chance of being the Pagemap designers this month. Becky offered us a choice of sketches but didn't have any takers for 8 1/2" x11" so asked me if I'd do the double. Well, if you know me you know I can't say 'no' to anything really so I said, 'sure, I'm up for the challenge'. And here is the sketch that Becky sent me. She said it was cute and it was :) I usually pick up a sketch and go with it immediately but because I was out of my comfort zone I thought about this one for quite some time and slept on my ideas for two nights before commiting it to paper. I wanted to have one big photo but my flower photo originals are on disk and my disk drive is broken so I ended up having to print lots of photos off my facebook album and using them instead. I'm really pleased with the LO (although perhaps I added one too many butterflies). You can see what the rest of the design team did on the pagemaps website today.