Look how teeny tiny she looks! Geez, I can’t believe how quickly time has flown!
At the start of September Piper was moving up into a bigger class at nursery and I it coincided almost perfectly with her one year anniversary of starting nursery school. I was looking through my photos one day and I found these few snapshots which I had taken during one of Piper’s settling in days at nursery.
The school is really cool, and each of the class rooms is named after a bear, starting with koala bears (for non movers), grizzlies (for crawlers) and then teddies for adept walkers, and I wanted to make a scrapbook page to remember those first few days when she joined for the first time. A whole year had passed already, and i simply couldn’t believe it! It was the perfect time to put a page together.
I decided that clean and simple was the way to go. I used a mix of bright papers and patterned papers to create a nice mix and staggered two photos as the main focal points of the page. To support a school theme i used a ruler stamp and also that pencil printed unto paper which was actually part of some junk mail that came through the door a few weeks before. heheee (waste not want not)!
My journaling started small but grew large, and to be honest i kinda love it when that happens because i don’t want to feel like i am restricting the story in any way, but it did mean that i was cutting it a bit fine when i was trying to make it fit on the page! lol.
I am still loving this notebook edge die from MFT, particularly mixed with bakers twine. yummy!
In other news, I was delighted to receive issue 67 of Scrapbook Magazine in the post today, and was even more chuffed to find a two page spread featuring two of my layouts! {yeay! smiling from ear to ear! } Both pages were inspired by children’s stories, one 12×12 and one 8.5 x 11. Here’s a sneaky peeky to share….
Thanks for stopping by!
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A month or two ago, my friend Lindsey came over for a Saturday and we spent the day crafting. It was such a lovely change to be sharing my craft room and have another person there to bounce ideas off and also to have a jolly good laugh. Throughout the day we played with ink, papers, stamps and the trusty heat gun and we each made a plaque.
This was so far outside my normal crafty zone, but still so much fun. I was using supplies to guide Lindsey through the different techniques which she could use on her plaque. I never got to take a photo of hers (hopefully i’ll get one to show you guys at some point) but heres a look at mine.
Part of me is gutted i didn’t take step by step photos, but heres a quick run down of what i did to end up with this piece of art.
Before i even began i stuck my chipboard to the craft mat because i knew i wanted a good steady surface to work on. To do this i used masking tape all the way around the four edges. Then i stamped the butterfly (unity stamps) with clear embossing ink and embossed with white embossing powder. Before cleaning the stamp i also made an image into scrap paper which i cut out to use as a template. I sprayed repositionable adhesive on the back of the butterfly template and stuck this over the embossed image to create a mask. Next I cut a flowing section out of a piece of scrap paper and adhered to the chipboard once again using repositionable adhesive. This was a mask to add the little stream of butterflies, which once again i inked in clear and embossed in white. Next I removed the mask which protected either side of the butterfly stream, and covered this section with another mask. Next stop was to stamp and emboss the chevrons, over the top of the masked butterfly and the masked ‘stream’. At this stage of course, my whole project was white on white. The next stop was to add colour. I loved this bit, mostly because i had lots of fun with my distress inks! I started with the butterfly and i used my fingertips to blend the colour as it was kinda tricky to use the big bulky blending foam pad over the tiny areas. Next I reused the masks to cover the chevrons and used the blending tools to mix yellows and oranges into that middle section. I love the way it gives a kind of graduated look. <3 Next stop was the chevron section. Once again i masked off the butterfly and the yellow bit, and then added the teal colour with the blending tool.
At this stage the project looked really pretty. I was pleased with it, especially the subtle white outlines and funky colours. THEN guess what happened! As i was removing the masking tape, I realised i had made a booboo. The heat that was applied when embossing had made the masking tape really sticky and when i pulled it off, it ripped most of the upper coating of the chipboard. Ahh puuuH! In order to try to save it i grabbed a posca paint pen and drew the border. This gave the project a completely different look. A bit more funkylicious and punky! To bring it all together i also used the pen to outline some of the elements on the project, and to finish, added some beautiful felt alpha stickers. ohhhh pretty!
Im not sure where this will go, but i liked breaking out of the norm and trying something different.
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Ever have a project which has been lurking in your house for years? A forgotten project, once started, never finished? This was one of mine.
When I spent a year in France as part of my Uni degree Craig and I wrote letters to each other every week. I kept these all in a box along with some postcards and brochures etc from Lyon. When we moved into our previous house in 2009 I decided that i was going to make a mini book to hold all these items. I was going to make a video and I designed the whole thing and pre-cut all the papers and everything. Then I hit an issue. The video i was started was rubbish- the lighting was really bad, so much that the colours were not true and that bugged me soooooo badly. We also didn’t have a proper camera mount. Because of these things my inspiration flew out the window and hit itself in the face on the way out. I packed everything away together and then it lay in hibernation.
Fast forward. Geez, has it been three years?!
Then one day for no apparent reason, I did it!
I faced the giant and decided that it was GOING to GET MADE! I didn’t want to do a video any more, that ship had sailed, but it was silly having a half finished project staring at me all this time.
And here it is. And I LOVE IT! I like the design, (i wanted a vintage, timeless yet french inspired romantic feeling), I love the textures, I love the content, i love the story behind the project getting made and i love the fact that it is finished.
My bind it all had its work cut out for it because there were so many things to go in to the book. The final thing doesn’t even close properly but i don’t care. Because its done. and its great.
Do you have any projects which are dwelling on your mind? Go get inspired and face your own giant!
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