Bloggin' all around the World

Well not quite, but I have got a lot of posts that have gone up this past week that aren't actually here on my own blog! (And speaking of my blog, have you noticed the clean new look? It's still in need of a bit of tweaking, but what do you think?)

Let me show you some sneaks, and then you can check out the full versions for yourself...

#1

First up, I'm sharing another page made with the gorgeous Maggie Holmes Flea Market collection over on the Paper Stories blog. This is surely one of my favourite lines ever. The colours are exactly me, but that doesn't mean that I couldn't augment it a little with a bit of mixed media.

In fact, I've even posted another video on my YouTube channel that shares the process of this layout coming together. But for all the details and explanation head on over to the Paper Stories blog.

#2

Today I'm super-excited to say I'm Guest Blogging over on the Scrapbook Creations Magazine blog!! Asked to share something that's trendy or inspiring me right now I chose to go with my recent love of scrapping with neutrals. I put this layout together with the September JBS Papercrafting kit. The kit as a whole was actually really bright and colourful, but with some careful choices I turned it into this tone-on-tone page.

I share my tips and tricks for doing this though, as I think if you're not careful with scrapping with neutrals it might turn out a little.... well.. boring!

Scrapbook Creations have got a Blog Hop going on right now (which I'm a part of) where you've got a chance to win a 1 year subscription among other things. Check it out here.

#3

I was recently sent the newest products from X-Press It in order to review them. X-Press It are known best for their high-quality adhesives and they've just released Wide and Extra-Fine Glue Markers along with the standard size. I have to admit... I really loved them!

Putting them to the test I whipped out this set of relatively simple cards with some Basic Grey goodies. The feature piece of each card is the series of glitter stripes running along it's length. It shows you the difference in width of the 3 Glue Markers at a glance.

X-Press It have also got a Blog Hop going on right now where you could win these products for yourself! Check it out here. 

#4

And lastly... over at Jenni Bowlin Studios we're celebrating all things Autumn and Halloween. Slightly tricky I admit, given I definitely don't do Halloween and it's currently Spring here in Australia! But it's not like I don't have a thousand photos from 6 months ago sitting on my desk waiting to be scrapped, so turns out it wasn't that hard after all ;-)

It definitely helps that the October Papercrafting Kit was filled with all things Autumnal too, which I loved. But I have to admit I've got my eye on the November kits and can't wait for them to arrive on my doorstep!

And one last thing..
I've got my own Evalicious Giveaway going on right now, and it's open for anyone to enter. Good luck :-)

The Story of the 2 Medium Card

Just popping in real quick to share a card.
I whipped it up with the 13arts Birthday Card challenge in mind. It's pretty easy - just create a card using at least 2 mediums.

At least I thought it was easy until I saw Georgia's amazing attempt at the same challenge. Feeling daunted much... in the presence of the master?!!

Doesn't matter. I still think it's a bit cute, and it's firmly cementing my love of pink/yellow/teal. Looks a little bit too much like this other card I created a while back though doesn't it? Pure coincidence! Similar materials of course. The gorgeous Carta Bella Hello Again and Maggie Holmes Flea Market collections. I'm going to use every last little scrap of them I'm sure. 

Don't forget - I've got my own Evalicious Giveaway going on here, and the Scrapbook Creations / A Piece of Cake Designs Blog Hop is still hopping too! Plenty of chances for some fabulous prizes :-)

The Story of the Wild Thing (and a giveaway)

The SC/APOCD Blog Hop is still going on. For your chance to win a 6-month subscription to Scrapbook Creations and a bunch of loveliness from A Piece of Cake Designs then scroll down to my previous post. 

When I posted the new collection of Puffy Stickers from Evalicious on my Instagram account the crowd went wild! And I can't blame them. I just love this new product from Evalicious and I was sooo lucky to be able to play with them. And if you read to the bottom of this post you might just have a chance to WIN some too!

 

But first... my project. Having gone a little card-crazy lately I needed to return to making layouts, and boy was I a little rusty. I must have shuffled things around on this for hours. Probably because I was trying to fit so many of the new delicious Evalicious products in, and sometimes I need to remind myself that 'less is more'. I'm not very good at that ;-)

I picked out some of the mint-green, pink and woodgrain colours from the Everyday collection and layered in lots of cute tags, tabs and stickers. I even cut into one of the Large Tags and made it into a photo frame. The Puffy Stickers came last because they were the perfect finishing touch.

I'd like to think my girls are basically good at heart. In fact, I know they are. But they're young and in their growing, exploring, seeking, striving and stretching they will always push the boundaries. The tantrums that can come of their little bodies is quite incredible. Arms flapping, legs kicking, high-pitched screaming. Yep, sometimes they delve 'into the wild'.
And then I overhear a conversation that reminds me of their true character ....

My eldest takes hold of her sister's shoulders and says, "listen to me now. You're special no matter what. You don't need any fancy clothes, you're special because you're you."

So with that joy in my heart I offer you this little GIVEAWAY!!

Want to win some of your own Evalicious Puffy Stickers and Badge Buttons? Simply leave me a comment here telling me something about your own 'wild things' (interpret that as you wish!) Open internationally, I'll draw a winner Saturday 2nd. Good luck!


Evalicious Supplies:

Evalicious Everyday Snipsnip Large Tags Evalicious Everyday Miscellany Stickers Evalicious Everyday Snipsnip Labels Evalicious Everyday Snipsnip Page Tabs Evalicious Puffy Stickers: Miscellany Shapes Evalicious Puffy Stickers: Itinery V2

InLinkz.com

SC / APOCD Blog Hop

Call them flair, call them badges, call them buttons... doesn't matter! These cute little embellishments come in every design under the sun, and they're such a huge trend right now. If you've ever seen any of my work you'll know that I love them to bits and there's barely a project that goes by without me adding one (or more!) to it. That's why I just knew I had to take part in the Scrapbook Creations and A Piece of Cake Designs blog hop!

Join us today as we take an online tour around the internet to show you some of the amazing creative people using flairs out there.

In case you stumbled here by chance or you're just lost... here is the full hop list in order:

Scrapbook Creations 

Kayla M 

Alison C 

Lizzy H 

Sharmaine K 

Michelle S 

Kylie C 

Holly C 

Natalie E 

A Piece of Cake Designs

Plus the awesome inspiration from the Scrapbook Creations Online Team: Natalie M – Renee I – Jenny G

And guess what? There's something in it for you for following along! All you need to do is leave a comment on all of the hop blog posts or you can post a flair project to your own blog and link to our blog hop, you go into the draw to win!

ONE Major winner: $25 gift voucher to APOCD and a one-year subscription (six issues) to Scrapbook Creations 

TWO Minor winners: Variety of flairs from APOCD and a six-month subscription (three issues) to Scrapbook Creations

But first, let me share with you a project I put together for the Blog Hop. It's a series of tags based on the design of a Dream Catcher, each featuring one of my favourite A Piece of Cake Designs Blushing Words Cherry Flair!

Inspired by the ombre colour scheme of the Cherry Flair I stuck with a basic 'white and one other colour' for each tag in turn.

I hung plenty of ribbon, lace and feathers from each one. And included a sprinkling of glitter and bling to give them a magical and whimsical feeling. I have to admit, my idea for these came from all the fabulous Dream Catchers my sister (Jasper Lane) makes in real life. But I'm kinda so happy with how these came out in paper-form that it's going to be hard to part with them.

Thanks for visiting with me today on the Scrapbook Creations and A Piece of Cake Designs blog hop! You're nearly there... just hop on over to the A Piece of Cake Designs Blog and you're done. I hope you've enjoyed the journey?

Don't forget to leave a comment here in order to go into the draw to win one of the fabulous prizes. Last entries on Friday 1st November at midnight, and the winners will be announced on the Scrapbook Creations blog Monday the 4th. Good luck!!

The Story of the Love Thing

.... No, not that love thing ;-)

I'm off to another wedding today. Not your average over-the-top affair, but a second (in fact third for one of them) wedding for a more mature couple. Therefore I thought my card should represent all of those things and I kept it a lot more classic and demure.

Sticking to some of my favourite techniques of late, such as a monochromatic colour scheme and filling glassine bags with little surprise packages of confetti (in this case wooden veneer bits) I was able to put this together in a flash.

But oh my gosh, I have been scrapping up a storm this last week that I've been on holidays. Thanks for all your well-wishes about my exam. The results are out on the 1st of November so I'll be sure to let you all know. But until then I've got a tonne of projects to share both here and all around. Next up is something very exciting on Monday, so make sure you come back then!

The Story of You and Me

I'm super-lucky to be working with the gorgeous Maggie Holmes collection "Flea Market" for my DT assignments this month at Paper Stories. I love that Georgia knows me so well that she chooses collections that suit me perfectly! It's got enough greens and yellows in it to make neutral or even masculine projects, but the initial impact of this collection is that it's prefect for vintage romantic girly pages.

Well... this is about as romantic as you're going to get from me! I still prefer my pages to have more of a graphic layered effect than a shabby chic look, but you could just as easily go that way too. I began with white cardstock and created some mixed-media effects in the background with stamping, modelling paste and mist. I find this gives me lots of texture without creating too much bulk, and it's a chance to get more complimenting (or even contrasting) colour onto the page. You can totally take a collection to different level by using varying colours, but here I chose to stick with the mint green.

After creating a basic structure to the page with the gorgeous pink Fine China paper and the hearts from Treasure, I cut the Heirloom paper into all it's various tags and strips and layered pieces of them on top. I love that manufacturers are making papers like this that effectively give you a tonne of embellishments at very little cost.

But speaking of embellishments, they don't get more luxurious and decadent than the gold pieces out of the Adhesive Chipboard sheet. Pure love! I used the "Me & You" banner pieces (and turned the phrase around so I could create my rhyme) for a title and placed the little gold hearts in the opposite corner to create some balance. I think if you're going to use gold you should limit it to just one or two areas otherwise it can become quite overwhelming. But as a title it makes quite a bold statement!

I'll be back real soon to share some more adventures with this stunning collection. Just you wait to see what I've got in store for that Gold Doily Vellum!!

The Story of the Wonky Birthday

Sorry for the radio silence over here, but with one last huge exam pending tomorrow I've had to scale back just slightly on the scrapping this week. Meanwhile, all prayers for success tomorrow will be much appreciated!

But there's still life, and when Munchy was invited to a last-minute girly birthday party on the weekend then a last-minute girly birthday card was in order.

I literally just grabbed the scraps that were sitting on my desk to create this. The only part that needed any effort was getting out the Silhouette to cut 'birthday' (because the 'happy' was already printed on the pink Dear Lizzy paper). Super-happy with how it came out. Lots of glitter and sparkles were the obvious choice, and an Evalicious badge button to top it off.

I just love it when my girls see something I've made and then gasp in delight! Especially because they don't notice the details like how I sewed on 'birthday' wonky and how I got too over-zealous with the silver mist and had to cover it up with bling ;-)

The Story of Small Packages

I have to be honest, when I first saw the bright colours in the Glitz Designs Finnley collection I was a little daunted. I wasn't quite sure how I was going to make it work, and I actually decided it wasn't for me. Boy am I glad I decided to try it out anyway, because it turns out it's now one of my current faves!! 

I used turquoise cardstock for the base of this layout because it brings a new colour into the mix of red and green which stops it from looking too Christmassy and also makes it a little different from 'all the rest'. But it was another quite bright colour so I had to be sure to use lots of black and white to tone it all down a notch ;-)

The speech bubbles stencil was an exclusive in a past JBS kit and I simply gessoed over the whole thing here to give me lots of little places to add my journaling. After I told my story I simply filled the other ones with a few cute embellishments.

I cut up one of the Finnley journaling cards to use as my title and allowed it to prompt me into my layout topic. This saying "great things come in small packages" is something I hear a lot! At only 5ft 2" and having quite a petite frame I often get mistaken for being much younger than I am, and I don't carry much 'oommph' when I walk into a room. That is, until I open my mouth ;-) So I think people commonly offer this quote to me as some sort of condolences. I promise you, I don't need it.

I don't think my girls will have to worry about it though. Everyone on The Man's side of the family is quite tall - even the females. So I figure with half of his genes they'll probably balance out somewhere nicely in the middle. I can already see Munchy shooting up like a beanstalk. I reckon she'll be fitting into my clothes by the time she's 10. That'll make for some interesting times!

I had this layout up earlier in the month on the Paper Stories blog. I've been back there since then sharing the projects I've been making with the new Maggie Holmes Flea Market collection. I just love it! Here's a sneak of what's coming up next....