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Saturday, July 30, 2011

Apron Strings Day 18 - 21

Okay, this is it for the Apron Strings Out With the Old, In With the New Challenges! Four last layouts.

I've had a ton of fun rediscovering and using my older papers and embellishments. A HUGE thank you to Lori for the kick in the butt to scrap and scrap and clean out my stuff. I found that since I've been actively working with my supplies I have really learned which products I like to work with, which styles I like to do and, more importantly, which I don't! As I've been "forced" to use some older product I've made the decision to get rid of it if I'm not completely loving it. Paige's kindergarten class is going to be getting a large box of stuff in September that I have decided I no longer want to play with!

So without further ado ... Day 18. The challenge was to select your oldest non-Christmas kit and pair it with your most recent Christmas-time photos. She gave us a sketch too.


I made it into a one-pager again.
Journalling reads: "They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, these pictures are priceless to me so I guess that means there aren't enough words to express how they make me feel!! After years of avoiding mall Santas because of Paige's fears - this year we finally did it. Thank you Paige. I am so, SO proud of you!!"

Oh, and don't you just love my Christmas ornaments? Some circles cut on my Cuttlebug with some glitter added plus hand stitched strings and a Martha Stewart bow sticker. Easy peasy!

Supplies used: Cardstock - Bazzill; Patterned Paper - American Crafts, Craft Fair - Myrtle O'Seam and Marge Memmingway and from a la Mode - Crepe; Bows - MS Grosgrain Bow Stickers; Alphas - Sassafras Chocolate Glitter Alphas; Border punch - EK Success.

Day 19's challenge was to try a Classic-style layout, paired with an older kit of your choice. What is Classic? Well it doesn't mean boring, it means timeless - clean lines, traditional-styled patterns with an updated feel. Look for clean lines, crisp designs and a more muted palette.

There was no sketch for today but I used one from Day 5 as my basis for the above sketch. I figure my usual style of choice is classic so I didn't do anything special here. The papers are basically the same ones from the previous layout. I had them all out on my desk and I loved them so much I wanted to keep using them. So I did.
My layout, my rules!!

Some close ups - first the left hand page. 
And the right hand page. 

The titlework. 

And some of the embellishments. 


Products used: Cardstock - Bazzill; Patterned Papers - American Craft from Craft fair, Nancy Knitley, Mona Trimenez, Alice Stitchensen, Faye Needleworth and Myrtle O'Seam and from a la Mode, Sorbet; Alphas - AC Thickers Sprinkles Glitter letter stickers in white and Thickers Roller Rink Glitter letter stickers; Punch - MS Bubble Bath; Ribbon - MS piped nylon 3/16" Camelia Pink.


Day 20's challenge was to use a Christmas/Winter themed kit with non-Christmas/Winter photos. Add in some of your newest soft embellishments (ribbon, felt, etc.)

The sketch she provided was this one - which I again adapted to make a one-pager.


I swear to you these are Christmas Themed papers! They are from the Dear Lizzy line that came out last year. My newest, soft embellishments are the ribbons and the fabric flowers which, I'll be honest, aren't all that new but since my absolute newest ones were all cupcakes ... these will have to do! Again, my layout, my rules!! LOL! Oh, the alphas are the foam ones which are both really new and very soft. So there!



Products used: Cardstock - extra refill sheets cut down to size; Patterned Papers - AC Dear Lizzy Christmas collection; Alphas - mini ones are from Echo Park Wintertime Alpha sticker sheet, title alphas are AC Thickers Sprinkles glitter letter stickers in white and Thickers Delight Foam letter stickers; Ribbons - Craft Essentials in Cranberry and My Minds Eye Lush Blue ribbons; Brads - MME Lush Decorative brads in blue; Flowers - AC Greenhouse fabric flowers; Butterfly shapes - cut out on my Cuttlebug with Spellbinders Nested Butterfly dies; punch - EK Success Large Edger Scallop Daisy; bling - from a friend.

Day 21's challenge (the last one - boo hoo!) was to use an older kit containing paper with trees of some kind, pair up the older kit (or papers if you don't have a kit) with newer round embellishments and newer tags. The sketch she gave was this one.


Which I flipped around and turned into this.


The left hand side. 

The right hand side. 

And some close ups of the details. 


Lori said she wanted trees! 

My older papers with trees are Bella Blvd and my newer round embellies are the bling which are new-to-me from my friend Sandra.

Products used: Cardstock - from stash; Patterned papers - all from Bella Blvd's Sunny Happy Skies collection; Alphas - AC Thickers Patchwork Fabric letter stickers; Flowers - cut on my cuttlebug with Spellbinders Big Scalloped Circles; punch - EK Success Open Scallop, sticker embellies also Bella Blvd.


Okay, that's it, that's all! My family is chomping at the bit to get going to a bbq so I'd better post this and log off. To all my fellow Canadians, have a wonderful BC Day long weekend!

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Apron Strings Day 17

I've been attending to other things the past few days so haven't been creating in my scrap room (other things have been afoot that I will share in due course!! It's gonna be good!!!) But tonight I sort of forced myself to start this weeks challenges for Lori at Apron Strings.

Monday's challenge was to: Use the following color scheme found in an older Apron Strings kit (if no kits, use your older papers) then add some of your newer silver or glittery embellishments.

And she provided yet another awesome Becky Fleck PageMaps sketch. 

And here is what I came up with.

Sorry about the quality of the picture - it's dark out now and my lighting is terrible.

Some close ups. 
At the last minute I did the outline doodle around the picture grouping and a faux stitch here around the title spot.

Don't you just love my banner? One of the American Crafts papers I used had these rows of banners on it so I cut out the six different colours and then glued them all together.
The "newer silver or glittery" is these little brad-like things. They definitely fall into the new-to-me rather than the new-from-the-store category as my good friend Sandra was kind enough to give me a whole lot of embellishments she's getting rid of. (She's a HUGE part of the "things afoot" I was talking about earlier ... but you're going to have to wait for more details!! I'm mean that way!)

Products used: Cardstock - Bazzill; Patterned Paper - AC, Craft Fair - Ethel Dartsmith, Alice Stitchenson and Myrtle O'Seam, a la Mode - Sorbet and Crepe, and The Goods - Trimmings; Alphas - AC Delights Foam Letter  Stickers; Embellishments - AC Dear Lizzy Bliss Patterned Chipboard Shape Stickers, Colorbok Metal Dots.

Thanks for stopping by. See you soon. Tomorrow is Friday and I will TRY to get a personal post up for all my family clamouring to see pictures of something other than scrapbook layouts. But I make no promises! I've got 3 more challenge days to complete (four by the end of tomorrow), laundry to do (didn't I just DO laundry?!) and a visit to one of Marley's friends to pay. She fell off the new playground at the girls' school Monday night (remember when I was rejoicing that Greg had taken the girls to drop-in gymnastics ... yeah, not so much!) and broke her arm quite badly so Marley desperately wants to see her and cheer her up. And sign her cast - which I think she is secretly envious of!

Off to bed now - g'night!

Monday, July 25, 2011

OLW July and MotherLOAD Week 4

I managed to convince Greg to take the girls to the drop-in at Delta Gymnastics (thanks Colleen!!) so while I have the house to myself I thought I'd better post about  the work that went on in my craft room this weekend. And today. But mostly over the weekend! :)

First up, was One Little Word. At the beginning of July I got caught up on the past few months of homework assignments (see this post here) and I've been working on July's assignment all month. Let me explain. The task was to pick 9 songs that comprise a soundtrack of our Word as it applies to us right now. This was tricky for me. I love music and music can generate such a wide range of feelings in me. Greg and I have mostly widely differing tastes in music! He likes the new, edgy Rock/Alternative stuff (with a healthy dose of the 80's and 90's in there too - gotta keep those highschool memories alive!) while I tend towards more Rock/Pop/Country genres. It may be jouvenile for me to rock out to Miley Cyrus or Britney Spears but it gets those happy hormones flowing and that's really what music is all about for me. Plus, the girls "get it" too so we can dance around the house together!

My word is Release and when I Googled "release" and "song titles" all I got was a huge long list of various artists album and/or song release dates. Which I kind of figured was going to be the case. So I went to plan B. I opened up iTunes and pulled up "most played" and went shopping for the tunes that spoke to me. Out of my list of 17 or so, I slowly worked on narrowing it down to 9. Then we were to make up little canvasses using our song titles and some lyrics from the song which spoke to our word.

Here's what I came up with ... initially.


And then in the divided protectors.

But imagine my horror to notice while editing my photos that I misspelt a word on my #7 tag!
Gasp!
I quickly redid it and here are the close ups.

1. Hung Up by Madonna
2. Don't Stop The Music by Rihanna
3. Come What May from the Moulin Rouge Sountrack

4. Raise Your Glass by P!nk
5. Don't Speak by No Doubt
6. F**kin' Perfect by P!nk

7. Uprising by Muse
8. Intervention by The Arcade Fire
9. Don't Stop Believin' by Journey

Ali asked us to burn our soundtrack to a CD and put it into the album. On my soundtrack are 2 bonus tunes. They are The Landlord's Walk and Nelson Mandela's Welcome to the City of Glasgow by Blair Douglas. Both of these are purely instrumental (rockin' bagpipes and drums mostly) so I figured it was safe to add them as I couldn't exactly do the lyrics part of the assignment! They speak to my Scottish roots and always bring a smile to my face and a skip to my step.

I found this transparency in my stash and love the words on it. They really evoke everything that I want to invite into my life right now.

And here is the finished spread.

Everyone is back now and bugging me to put them to bed so I will continue this shortly ...

Okay, girls are in bed, SYTYCD Canada is on the PVR, life is good.

For Week 4 of the MotherLOAD Marathon we are focussing on using what we love and loving what we use. Don't those two things go hand in hand? I haven't done the photo assignment yet which is to take a picture of our favourite ritual but I've done the other two assignments.

First up is the layout assignment. We were to dig out that paper or kit that we've been saving for a "special" layout and JUST USE IT!! I've been hording an entire set of Little Yellow Bicycle's Zinnia collection waiting for .... not sure what. So, as per instructions, I broke it out and got busy. Here's what I came up with.

I chose some pictures from our trip to Whistler for our 4th anniversary when Marley was 21/2 and Paige was 5 months old. See her there in the Snuggly? So cute!
But I digress.
When I pulled the papers and put them with the pictures I really wasn't sure how it was all going to come together. But in the end I love this!

Here are some close ups. First the left hand page. 
The 'Beautiful' is an acrylic accent (from one of the many embellishment packs I have for this collection) and the rest of the title was cut out on my Cricut.

The right hand page. 
The quote along the bottom was actually like that in the paper and I loved it, so I cut out that strip and used it to frame the pictures along the bottom. They call the green accent in the top right corner a photo mat but I used it for my journalling.

Some more close ups of the embellishments. 
 
At the last minute I added the 'love' and the number 4 (which is the only thing NOT from the Zinnia collection). I figured since it was our 4th anniversary and we were a family of 4 at that time it was fitting.

These are little fabric stickers and I originally just put them on the paper but it looked too flat and you could barely see the purple 'love' one. So (in one of those many embellishment collections) I found these acrylic flowers which I popped up with foam dots and voila! WAY better!

I created these little felt flowers from (you guessed it!) a kit! LOL! Then I added the acrylic leaves.

A closer look at the title work. I put it on top of two journalling stickers to which I added the dates of the weekend.

Okay, the final thing for this evening is the homework assignment. We were to put together 4 "snack packs" which we apparantly will be using later during the Marathon part of this class (yikes!)
Here they are!


Want to see them up close?

Some felt flowers, some little journalling tags ...

some bigger journalling tags ...

some buttons, some butterflies ...

and finally, a rosette.
Can't wait to break them out!

All right, now to focus on the dancers on my TV right now.
Thanks for checking out my little blog. Remember to leave some love, you never know when it may come back to you!!




Friday, July 22, 2011

Apron Strings Days 14 - 16

No 5 on Friday today I'm afraid. I've been too busy getting this weeks Apron Strings Out With the Old, In With the New Challenges completed. Without further ado ...

Day 14: use an older kit that contains paper with polka dots. Combine that older kit with your newest rub-ons or stickers.

I used the sketch above (that Lori provided for us) as inspiration for this. 
Old papers are some Basic Grey that I've been hording and the new stickers are ones from Sassafras as well as the picture frame from Studio Calico.

Here's the left hand page. 

And the right hand page. 

Close up of the title and journalling work. (That little heart is one of the new stickers!) 

Another close up of the embellishments. 

Products used: Cardstock - Bazzill; Patterned paper - Basic Grey, Olivia and Basics; Alphas - AC Thickers Sprinkles in white; Punches - EK Success Large Edger Circles, Marvy medium scalloped heart, MS Punch all over the page Butterfly, Marvy 1" circle; Tag - Bazzill Chips Chipboard tags; Journalling tags - LYB Boardwalk Journal Tablet, Jillibean Soup Circle Sprouts in white; Frame - Studio Calico Wood Veneer Frame misted with Tattered Angels Glimmer Mist in Brick and Tsukineko Walnut Ink Antiquing Solution; Stickers - AC Remarks from Surprised, Sassafras Cardstock stickers from Sweet Treats; other - Paper Whimsies in Retro and Head Count from Sassafras.


Day 15: take out your oldest kit that fits the newest style challenge. FREESTYLE. Freestyle is freedom. There are no rules, you just play: doodle, sketch, outline photos with pens instead of matting them, the look (or if you're brave your own hand) of hand-drawn titles and shapes, free-form designs. Playful.

As you can see, I had a lot of fun with this layout. And I really like it so I guess the moral of the story is to have fun while you're creating!!



I drew around some chipboard alphas to get the title and then coloured in the #3.

Playful to me means lots of cute embellishments and stickers!!

Products used: Patterned paper - Imaginesce Twitterpated line, Mushroom Fancy, Hey Foxy, Colorful and Flower Trails; Punches - EK Success Open Scallop, corner rounder, Marvy medium scalloped heart and 1" circle; Alphas - Crate Paper Crateboard Alphas from Wildflower; Stickers - Bella Blvd from Sunny Happy Skies, Flirty and Plastino; ribbon - from stash; white cardstock - from stash; tag cut out on my Cricut using George Basics.

Day 16: Use your oldest Apron Strings kit (no kit? Then your oldest papers and embellies) with big bold strips. Be sure to incorporate the color red, something round and rings.

Stripes? Check. Circles? Check. Colour red? Check and check.


Products used: Cardstock - Michaels; Patterned paper - AC Tea Party; Ribbon - Offray Red Grosgrain ribbon; Doilies - MS Die Cut Lace Tags; Alphas - Recollections Alpha Adhesive Stacks; Buttons - Daisyd's Tiny Treasures Assorted Buttons; Brads - BG.

That's it. Thanks for checking them out!