The Story of 28 Patterns

Before there was The 100 Day Project (check out my Instagram if you don't know what I'm talking about) I participated briefly in Julie Balzer's #28 Patterns which ran during February.
Yeah, I know, I'm really behind on my blogging ;-)

A simple concept of creating patterns with whatever method or medium you chose every day for 28 days. I find these challenges are great for diving into past supplies, stretching yourself creatively, coming up with new techniques and of course, having a bunch of fun at the same time.

To be honest, I wasn't very good at keeping up with this one. I think I only managed 2 or 3! But at least on this day I took my patterned piece of paper and actually did something with it - turning it into this retro-ish card with the addition of a couple of simple embellishments. So it became something practical for me too.

I'm still working on turning this one into a card too. I think it'll work nicely for a birthday card though don't you think?

Happy scrapping!
xx

The Story of the Peacock Card

I've definitely got a whole feather-obsession thing going on right now. My Instagram account is filled with different images of me making different versions of them. Some of them I have plans for... like when I posted all these peacock feathers in progress. Some of them (like this one) I don't know what I'm going to do with yet :-)

The photo above was merely step one in the great peacock-feather-adventure-card which ultimately ended up looking like this. 

 

I was super super excited to have my card and it's corresponding tutorial featured last week as a Guest Post on the blog of none-other than my long time crafty idol Julie Fei Fan Balzer!!



The feathers are actually made with a 6x6" stencil that Julie designed. It's a couple of years old now, but still remains one of my favourites, so when Julie asked for a tutorial using her stencils I knew just which one I was going to reach for. 

After much texture paste, watercolours and of course glitter (!) I had a whole flock of feathers that needed nothing anything else but a sentiment in order to create this fun card. Kinda looks like a firework explosion of peacock feathers don't you think?

If you're interested in checking out the whole tutorial of how this card came together from beginning to end then please go over and visit Julie's blog. Maybe you'll be inspired to create something feathery this weekend?

Peace and Quiet?

When I first saw the journaling criteria at Once Upon a Sketch this time around I was a little bit stumped for a moment. You see, the challenge says "journal at least 2 sentences on an embarrassing / awkward / uncomfortable moment. A moment you remember for all the wrong reasons!" and I'm a pretty easy going kind of girl - I don't embarrass too easily.

But then I remembered this awkward moment that I experienced a little while ago.....

I was performing an emergency Caesarian late one night and being on-call I had my phone in my pocket (on silent of course!) Now usually once the baby is out and the mother is cuddling it it's pretty quiet in the operating theatre whilst we finish the rest of the operation. But all of a sudden I hear a voice.... the voice of my husband!..... and it's coming out of my pocket!!

I hear him saying "Natalie... Natalie? hello? Why have you called me?"
It seems I had leant against the table and not only managed to speed-dial his number - but put him on speaker phone too!! If the whole theatre didn't hear him in the first place they certainly figured out what was going on as I awkwardly tried to lean down and speak firmly into my pocket "Hang up the phone!!"

Oh dear! Not my most professional moment :-)

So if you've got an embarrassing story to tell - why not scrap about it? It's very therapeutic :-) Along with the journaling criteria you also need to use this beautiful sketch. You can go and catch all the details on the challenge at the OUAS blog here.

We've got a fabulous line-up of Guest Designers for this challenge including my very favourite scrappy-crush Julie Fei Fan Balzer! And the mother-load in prizes including a chipboard-lovers dream package of Imaginarium Designs chippies. Not to mention you get to check out everyone else's funny stories too!

Little Things

Who said October Afternoon's Rocket Age collection should be just for boy pages?! Here I've been able to take it totally out of context and not only use it for a girl page, but a girly Easter page!...... Not that you can tell of course. I don't usually do 'theme' pages, I just like to tell a story.

On my last visit to the farm I took with me my June Paper Moon kit from Studio Calico and whipped up this page purely with the kit contents. Thaat's why you can't even spot my signature stitching anywhere (which makes me quite paranoid about it all falling to pieces!)

I tried to go all Julie FF. Balzer on this and hand-painted my title. I love the look of messy handwriting in comparison to the straight lines of the October Afternoon mini-alphs. Must do this again :-)

Ever since we were kids ourselves we've had a tradition at Easter of an egg-hunt - which continued even when we became 'grown-ups'! We've got even more excuse to keep this up now that my girls are old enough to participate too. This year was Moodles first time where she could actually go looking for the eggs herself.

The photos are of her and Poppy egg-hunting together. I think they both had as good a time as each other :-)

A Recycled Christmas - Magazine Tree

A big Christmassy welcome to anyone who might be here visiting because you saw my Guest Blogger gig on Julie's Holiday's Handmade series. Or for those who are my regular followers - go over and check out my Recycled Christmas post where I show you how to make a paper wreath and a plastic-bottle flower arrangement. There's lots of other fantastic tutorials going up this week too so definitely worth a look.

I thought I would continue on in my series on a Recycled Christmas today with this magazine tree. It's super-simple to make, although does take some patience..... a good one to do in front of the TV perhaps! (I snapped pictures of my sister as she folded this tree. The whole family is involved in making Recycled Christmas decorations this year. Coming up later on will be my mum's vinyl record cake platter.)

Take an old magazine or paperback book, doesn't really matter what size but the more pages in it the fuller your Christmas tree will be. I'm pretty sure we were using a Reader's Digest here which was perfect really. Starting with a right-hand page, fold it down towards the spine as in the picture above (she had already done quite a number of the pages already by the time I took this photo)

With the same page, fold it towards the spine again.

Now turn the page over, and fold up the little triangle that is hanging down below the bottom.
And that's it. Repeat that a gazillion times and you're done :-)

When you've finished folding the entire magazine you'll be able to fan it around and glue the two covers together back-to-back to complete the circle. Alternatively, if your tree isn't full enough you can glue two magazines together for more pages.

This is really only a base (although you could leave it just as it is). We gave our trees a quick makeover with some gold spray-paint. And then embellish however you would like. Here I've got one of my Aluminium Angels perched on top. I showed you how to make these in an earlier Recycled Christmas post.

But perhaps some tinsel? Or baubles? Or lights!! Yes lights might like really awesome.... I'm going to do that!

If you're new here, you might also want to check out my December Giveaway. Or just generally have a look around! Let me know if you're here visiting from Julie's blog :-) And stay tuned for more Recycled Christmas ideas coming up.

Inspired by Interior Design

Have you ever been inspired by something seemingly totally unrelated to scrapbooking?
Well I certainly won't take credit for this idea because it wasn't mine. But about 6 months ago Julie Fei Fan Balzer (you know how much I love her creativity) posted a photo of a kitchen or study or something and talked about how you could turn that photo into a sketch and apply it to scrapbooking. How ingenious is she??!! I drew that sketch in my journal and have finally decided to put it to good use (yes, sometimes it takes a long time for ideas to get from my journal to the page..... and sometimes they never do!)

So this layout is pretty much a direct interpretation of the sketch (it was so long ago, I don't have a link I'm afraid). But there were three cupboards across the top left - which turned into the three photos, and a long bookcase along the far right - which turned into the blocks of patterned paper. And I think the main photo was from a table or something. Sorry - bit hazy on the details of the photo - I just copied the sketch she drew.

I'm also playing along with Prompt #15 Colour Me Brightly at the challenge blog Creative Prompts 4U with this layout. It was a colour scheme challenge - to use the colours red, blue and yellow, so I've used my old favourite October Afternoon, and thrown in some Sassafras Lass as well.

The photos are from our monthly photoshoot of the girls, this one from March (you can see my formal shots/layouts here and here). But I've used some of the photos that were good, but didn't make the cut for the final choice of photo. And the (brief) journalling says "it takes many attempts and lots of photos to try and capture the perfect shot"

I recently also posted the layout I did where I used someone's outfit as a source of inspiration. Have you ever turned a different source of inspiration into a scrapbook layout? I'd love to hear about it.