Moriah's Jan and Feb pages

Things I've learned via this process of catching up with Project Life....
1. All those month-specific embellishments in my Studio Calico kits that I thought weren't my thing (mainly because I find it so hard to scrapbook in the moment since I'm usually catching up on the past) are actually getting used now. And I love them! 

2. I'm finding a place to keep all those little bits of kid-art that are too pretty to throw away, but which seem to accumulate in ever-increasing piles. And I love that it helps tell the story of where they are at right now.

3. Instagram is my friend in this process. Most of the photos I use in my spreads were first posted there, so all I need to do is go back and see what I wrote at the time et voila... journaling done!

4. I want to include bright colours in all the spectrum of the rainbow in every spread. I can't help it!

5. Finding the balance between photos, kid-art, memorabilia, filler cards, journaling and my own cards from the 100 Day Project is hard, but I'm very happy when I think I've got it right!

6. Despite previous years declarations of never feeling drawn to do Project Life in a weekly way I can now understand why people do. I'm loving this!!

If you ever have any questions about what products I've used, or anything else you're wondering, don't hesitate to ask :-)

Jot Kids Lego Challenge part 1

The girls have always loved getting involved with the Jot Kids challenges that are posted on the school holidays. And now that this year I'm a Jot Girl they've been privy to the inside info about what it's going to be, and are invited to take part like designers. They may have both squealed and done a little happy dance before knuckling down to create some pages!

The challenge for these holidays has been to use the Mood Board to spark some creative play with Lego, and then make a page about the experience too.



It was perfect timing for us as Moriah had already spent the last week working on her huge (17 pages worth of instructions) Lego Friends cafe before we even knew about the Jot Kids challenge. So it was obvious what she was going to scrap!

And here she is with her finished page. We stuck with the primary colours despite her Lego house being pink, but I think it works just the same. I let her loose with a couple of my old JBS kits which had all the right papers and she was able to quickly build up some layers like a pro!

Jot Kids Lego Challenge part 2

Bethany on the other hand, heard the word Lego and got all excited and built something with pretty much every set we own! We snapped some photos and she wanted to scrap them straight away. Once again we dove into my collection of old JBS kits I hadn't yet killed and she chose all these bright Glitz papers. What I love most of all though is all that journaling she wrote out by herself. Lots and lots of journaling describing what she'd built!

Depending on where you live the school holidays might be coming to an end or they might have only just started. Either way it doesn't matter because we've left the closing date as the 1st August so that it allows you plenty of time to let your kids get creative.

The prize has been donated by Anita from Flutterby Designs and she's always very generous with what she gives away. Your kids will love it - trust me!

You can get all the details about the Jot Kids competition here on the Jot blog.

Happy scrapping!

The Story of the Stamped Tea Towel

This is the story of a lovely project from The Makers' Box which I thought I could customise to suit my rainbow heart but which all went interestingly wrong!

It started off with the best of intentions. I had my project supplies all ready, I had my instructions read, and I had ideas of how I wanted to change it up. The original project takes you through a lovely stamped triangle design on a linen tea towel. Great instructions with troubleshooting advice to boot. A fabulous quick and easy project if you like monochrome. Which I do. But I love ROYGBIV more.

So arming myself with an array of reinkers I dampened my tea towel and set to work dropping and smooshing a combination of yellow, orange and pale pink onto it. But after I hung it in the sunshine to dry the strangest thing happened. Pretty much all the colour except for the darkest of orange spots faded away to nothing and I was left with an almost white tea towel again!

Now lets be honest, I did no research into this. I didn't use fabric dye, it's not even a permanent dye. I don't know if the tea towel was treated with something and I should have washed it first. I don't know if it was the sun that did the fading. All I know is I experimented with something new and it didn't quite work out as I imagined! But that's ok. What is creativity if not to try, fail, try something different and succeed?

So moving right along I added some darker colours next. Blue, green and mint. I also dropped on more pink and a touch of yellow. Once again when it dried I was left with just the blue and pink. What a mystery! Still, it's a bit pretty and I decided that was enough - on with the stamping!

I'm not naive enough to think I can actually use this now to dry my dishes. I'm pretty confident that if I washed this now all the colour would come out completely apart from the stamped triangles and I'm back at square one. I've actually moved it into my craft room and hung it on the end of my Raskog. If nothing else I can use it to wipe my painty hands on it - that might do the trick to keep some colour on it!

Something I had much greater success using my reinkers for was this great little art-meets-science activity I did with my girls last holidays. I wrote an article about creating with kids which you can read in Issue One of the Makers' Magazine. It's free and it's out now!

Bethany's Jan and Feb pages

Despite bloggy silence I've actually been crafting up quite a storm lately. I've got so much to share so it's really time I got on with it. Over the next couple of weeks I'll try and get caught up. I know I'll find that easier to do if I tell myself I don't have to write an essay every time. And lets be honest, it's sometimes hard to read everything on someone else's blog post. Sometimes pictures are enough. So I'll write stuff about products and stories when I feel like it, and leave it off when I don't. Deal?

I've been quite focused on Project Life recently and have spent my time doing this rather than a lot of layouts. A change can be quite refreshing for the creative soul. I've done lots and lots of pages in Judah's baby album (I'll tell you more about that another day) so at the beginning of June I decided to go back and start doing pages for each of the girls. They have separate albums and I'm doing a single page for each month.



I'm aiming for each page to have a mixture of photos, kid art, PL cards and of course plenty of stories. I know that often makes my pages look very 'eclectic' and not so cohesive, and they're always very very colourful, but that's just how I roll.

I'm also realising more and more that I have a real problem with white space. Like... if I see a blank area I just want to fill it with stuff! For example, that grey card above was lovely and simple with just the typed white words. Then I wrote the story underneath and decided it was unbalanced and needed something at the top. My newest Kellie Stamps brunch set (available for preorder on the 1st) was perfect. Is it now too much? Maybe. Probably! But that's ok.

A chunk of January was taken up with me and the girls putting together our Big Picture Classes Creating with Kids class (available here if you're interested) so this needed a few pockets dedicated to it. The photo of course, and the artwork on either side of it was made by Bethany at the time.

One of the best parts about creating these pages 6 months behind is that I actually get to use the most recent seasonal cards coming in my Studio Calico PL kits as soon as I get them. That's usually impossible for me here in Australia! And I'm so glad because I am in love with the latest Galileo kit and it's summery cards!

Apart from using pretty filler cards I'm also making an effort to put some of my homemade cards that I've been making as part of my 100 Day Project into the albums as well. The Origami Map stamp from Neat and Tangled made an awesome card that quickly became one of my favourites. I originally thought it would be great for a travel page, but I think it works just as well here next to the photo representing Bethany beginning music lessons in February. Go and do amazing things indeed!

I'll make the titles of these posts real obvious so that both you and I can keep track of what I've shared! Sound ok?

Jot Magazine Issue 10

The latest issue of Jot Magazine has just been released and as usual it's fabulous! For a free digital magazine you really can't get anything of a higher quality. Doesn't the sneak alone make you want to dive into it's pages?

As a Jot Girl I have two layouts in this issue. The first one features in the "Say What?" gallery which is all about the funny things our kids say. I had quite a few quotes I could have used for this one.

But I settled on a recent story about when Bethany met Amy Tan in March. She had only just discovered the world of Instagram and was gaining a few followers, and therefore considered herself quite famous. She wasn't shy about meeting a real scrapping celebrity either. She marched confidently up to Amy and stated, "I'm Bethany, one of the Elphie Kids. But you must already know who I am."

Yep. True story.

Now it only seemed fitting that if I was going to do a layout about Amy Tan that I should make it with Amy Tangerine products, so I pulled out my Yes Please collection and got to work. By mixing in a few different and newer supplies to embellish, it gives it a fresh look I'm think.

Because this issue of Jot Magazine marks it's 2nd birthday there's also a Celebration/Party gallery which I used as the prompting I needed to finally scrap about Bethany's 8th birthday. Which was in September by the way. Now you know why I said 'finally'!!

For this I used the Poet Society kit and it's Add Ons from Studio Calico. Not for any hugely sentimental reason other than me trying to kill a few of my older kits and this happened to be the first one I grabbed ;-) I keep all my old kits bundled together in separate plastic bags because I do like revisiting them from time to time.

Again, I like to think that if I add in just a couple of different embellishments it gives the kit a bit of a newer feel (even if the other embellishments aren't new themselves), but really I guess that's only in the eyes of myself and anyone else who happens to know obsessively which supplies came in which kit.

My much bigger stroke of genius came when I decided I was going to do my journaling 'interview style' and that I would actually let Bethany write her answers directly onto the page herself. Now it really is capturing this moment in time even better by including her handwriting too.

You can find both my layouts as well as a tonne of other inspirational projects (it's 166 pages long!) in Issue 10 of Jot Magazine right here. And did I mention it's free?!

Happy reading!

Winner Winner

Thanks everyone for your kind comments and interest in our little blog hop.
I've just spend the last little while adding up all the entries from both here and on Instagram and then counting through them all again once random.org spits out his magic numbers.

So the winners are....
agnus.k for the Aussie Prize, and aj_scrap for the Everywhere Else Prize.
By chance both of these ladies came from my Instagram entries and are being contacted over there. But I didn't want you guys left wondering if I ever picked a winner ;-)

And a great big thank you once again to our generous sponsor Spotlight!!

The Story of the Spotlight Blog Hop

Hello, and welcome to the Spotlight Blog Hop!
It's a quick one with only four stops along the way, but there's about a million prizes to make up for it. Ok, so that's a slight exaggeration ;-)

The order of the Hop goes something like this....
Aimee Dow
Kim Jeffress
Leeann Pearce
and then me!
Make sure to visit all of these girls and follow their specific instructions on how to win each prize. 

I've been a VIP member of Spotlight for the longest time. I can't even remember when I signed up. It gives me discounts and all the normal benefits that usually comes with a membership like that, but the best bit has always been getting advance warning of when the scrapping celebrities are coming to town!

March was a particularly exciting month. To celebrate National Craft Month my local Spotlight had in-store classes from both Amy Tan and Heidi Swapp. And even though Judah was less than 2 weeks old I knew this was an opportunity too good to miss.

Amy came on a Saturday which meant both my girls got to come along too. I'm pretty sure they were just as excited as me and they didn't hold back in letting it show. Many hugs later I think they considered her their new best friend. And let's not mention that at one point I wondered if we would ever get Judah back from her in return ;-)



And when Heidi came to visit three days later (notice how I seem to think of them both on a first name basis now!) I most definitely needed to drag myself out of pajamas again to pop in. Especially since I knew it would also give me the chance to meet IRL for the first time some Aussie scrappers whom I've admired online for a long time - Kim Jeffress, Leeann Pearce and Aimee Dow.

There were lots of photos taken of course. We all wanted to scrap the event in our own way. And now we all have! We decided to do a blog hop to celebrate the occasion and before we knew it, Spotlight were on board to sponsor a truck load of prizes! Thank you sooooo much Spotlight :-)

Each of the girls has a different lot of prizes on their blog, and we all have slightly different ways on how to win them too, so make sure you pay attention!

I've got two prizes to giveaway today!!

The first one is only for the Aussies I'm afraid. (Postage costs and all that jazz)

It starts off with a paper pad from both Amy Tan and Heidi Swapp's latest collections and ends with ... well.... EVERYTHING else you see here!

Whilst the second prize is up for grabs for another lucky winner, no matter where they live ;-)

So many fun embellishments and Project Life cards here.

How do you enter to win my prizes?

1. Leave a comment here on this post, making sure to mention where you're from as well. That will score you one entry. 
2.  For a second entry you need to pop over to my Instagram account, make sure you follow me there and leave a comment on the appropriate post. 

The competition is open until 8pm AEST Wednesday 17th June and the winners will be drawn at random from all the combined entries.

Good luck, and happy hopping!

June Jot Mood Board

This is probably the most fun and interesting card I've made in a long time. Not because it was difficult or features a favourite product or had any profoundly new technique involved. Just because it's a little bit different :-) And different can be a disaster or it can be a breakthrough.

I'm hoping I've struck the breakthrough this time?
Anyway, it's my own fault I got into this situation. You see, I had the opportunity to design the Mood Board challenge at Jot Magazine for this month. It looks a little something like this....

I honestly put it together just by choosing elements that are speaking to me at the moment. Hot pink, red, lime and kelly green. Which first lead to candy, which led me to watermelons, which lead to black and white spots.... and somehow flamingos got thrown into the mix as well. I certainly didn't put it together with any particular project already in mind. That would be like cheating ;-)

So when I went to make my own sample I started tossing stuff around in my usual manner. I pulled out lots of things with the colours I was after and began building up my layers. But somehow it just wasn't working. Then the lightning bolt went off! I remembered this small 4x4" sample painting of a watermelon when I was teaching Bethany how to waterpaint her fruit series earlier in the year. The colours were just right, the theme was perfect and all it needed was a little trimming down. I stuck it on my card, added a sentiment and that was it!

Of course, just like all my cards I couldn't help but add a few splashes of ink at the end. But that seemed fitting as well - it's like the watermelon juice has dripped everywhere. As it does!

I'd love to see how you interpret the challenge though. Lots of the Jot Girls have worked the flamingo into their layouts which I love too. What part inspires you?
The winner of this month's challenge will receive a gift voucher for the lovely Cocoa Vanilla shop.

All the challenge details are here. Will you play along?