And to All a Good-Night

Just popping in real quick here to share some super-speedy Christmas cards I had to whip up when I realised Munchy needed some to give to her Kindergarten teachers.

First up I stamped one big ol' sentiment, added some Fancy Pants rub-ons, sprinkle some Silver Maya mist et voila...... DONE!

And thank goodness for my Silhouette sketch pens! Add some blank cardstock, press a button and call it finished :-) That's the kind of quick card that's easy to impress with hey?

So from my Little Elphs to all of yours I wish you a Merry Christmas wherever you are and however you celebrate. Thank you for your ongoing support, your kind words of encouragement and your friendship.

I leave you with a little sneak peek into my December Daily that I plan to share with you over the next week. So happy to have undertaken this project. You'll understand my satisfaction even more when I show it to you......... :-)

Moxie Say What?!!!

Thank you to all the wonderfully supportive friends out there who have congratulated me on my Moxie Fab challenge win yesterday. I was in such a state of shock when I found this out. What an amazing honour to be chosen amongst so many other beautiful and talented entries.

Do you know what? I've had so much going on for me right now with work/family/scrappiness/etc that I totally forgot that I also made these two cards for another one of the Moxie Fab challenges 'Stamping with Shimmer Sprays'. So I better get them up quickly for you hey?

I used a similar technique for the background of both these cards. First I dry-embossed some watercolour paper, then painted the raised areas with different coloured shimmer sprays.

Then I gave the whole thing a good dousing with Silver Plated Maya Mist for a lovely sheen.

Just slightly different for this one. First I coloured my background watercolour paper with shimmer sprays using this technique that I've shared previously.

Then on the raised areas I 'painted' Perfect Pearls for extra glittery ooomph!

I just love 'inventing' new techniques and find the whole process quite fulfilling and fun!

May You Stay

Paper: Jenni Bowlin Studios, Basic Grey Curio, Cosmo Cricket Togetherness, Sassafras Indie Girl.

Alphas: Cosmo Cricket. Embellishments: Sassafras Indie Girl banner stickers, Scenic Route chipboard, 

clear envelope, Jenni Bowlin journaling stickers, buttons, pearls. 

Other: Mister Huey 'Calico White', Maya Mist 'silver plated'

The song "Forever Young" by Bob Dylan has some really lovely lyrics don't you think?
Don't worry, I didn't really know them before now either. But they're the challenge prompt at Get Picky this month so they were all written out for me to be inspired by.

But instead of just taking one line of the song, or the title (which would have been easy too) I just decided the whole song would make beautiful journaling so copied it en masse onto my layout! The lyrics could easily have been written by a mum to her young child and talk about all her hopes and prayers for her future. At least that's how I've interpreted them for my layout :-) 

I titled my layout "Listen to my Heart", a bit like the Roxette song "Listen to your Heart" since I was in the zone of interpreting songs for my page. It fit perfectly because this really is my heart for my Little Moodles (and plus, it also fit the criteria for the challenge at Bird is the Word!!!)

I used my favourite white and silver mists to spray some subtle stars in the background. They really are a lot more subtle than this to look at straight-on, but I was trying to capture the shimmer for you here :-) This was in response to my favourite line in the song which says "May you build a ladder to the stars And climb on every rung"

Born To Shimmer

Is anyone else like me?
Are you intrigued when your favourite designers post about thier process of building a page?
Do you love finding out how they gained thier inspiration and how they pulled thier products together?
Do you get a small amount of satisfaction when things go slightly awry? Just because it prooves they're not the perfect scrappers you sometimes imagine them to be :-)

Not that I put myself in that category of being anyone's favourite designer, but I thought I might do a post today showing you how I made this page work for me. It may or may not become a regular feature. We'll see. Tell me what you think at the end of the post.

So I started with my DT package from Handmade by Suzanne which was filled with some creamy vanilla cardstock, October Afternoon Modern Homemaker papers and some Webster's Pages lace which I made into flowers. And I was inspired to work with the sketch above designed by Valarie Salmon on the Pink Paislee blog. It was so quick to slap together this much on my page and call it almost done.

So it looks fine at this point, and for many a clean and graphic scrapper this would probably suffice (obviously it lacks a title and perhaps some journalling). But I just wasn't feeling it, and I had to walk away and leave it overnight before I could decide what to do.

The answer was fairly simple.... I had to make it more "me". I had to add some paint and ink and mess and emebellish it. There had to be no white space, and no clean lines!!
So I started with the first panal in the top right corner. I used my trusty homemade sunrays stencil and went to town with my yellow ink. Then I sewed some crazy messy stitches over the top and highlighted with some gold Stickles. Better. Much better.

The bottom left panal of paper got some Maya Mist treatment. I recently bought the Silver Plated one and I have to say this is my new favourite. What I especially love about these (compared to Glimmermists) is that they don't buckle and warp your paper nearly as much, and give such intense colours. It's hard to appreciate the shimmer in this photo (but wait until further on in this post!)

I added some pretty brads to the centre of my flowers, hand-stitched a stem and punched some leaves (which I also glittered!) to give these more detail too. Two little flowers to represent my two little girls :-)

More extra details - titles and subtitles (which were changed a few times, I should have taken photos of the before and after of that too... but I forgot), tags, border stickers, ribbon, journalling. And this is the end result. More my style don't you think, whilst remaining true to the original sketch.

Because I knew I was going to title this 'born to shine' in order to play along with the Bird is the Word "shine" challenge I knew I wanted to incorporate lots of shimmery, shiny, glittery accents. These pretty yellow and green alphas are both by Pink Paislee, and were just perfect.

Whilst the cream/red alphas are Jenni Bowlin, and I drew the 'shimmer' myself. I just bought myself a Silhouette machine and cannot wait for it to arrive - you'll see plenty more handcut titles on my pages then I can assure you! This is kind of like a practice run :-)

 

And this is the shot where I tried (still not quite successfully) to show you the shimmer and shine on this layout. Trust me - it looks real pretty :-)

So I would love to hear your thoughts. Tell it to me straight, I'm not afraid!