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 :)