Spooky

Happy Halloween! Hope you are enjoying your weekend whatever you got up to spooky or not!

Just I thought I would show you my layout for today's challenge at The Studio. As of this month, at the end of each month at The Studio we will be having a sketch so it was the first one today! You also had to make it have a Halloween theme or if you don't celebrate it any other holiday theme. Here's my take on the sketch, I flip it over!

 I don't really celebrate Halloween but seeing the pumpkins like this is a nice autumn sight. when I was younger I got really frighten by all the pumpkin faces and I still dredge seeing them now so that has put me off Halloween! I don't even own any Halloween patterned papers so I picked out some Halloween type colour papers and distressed the edges and then drew some cobwebs with a white pen to make it more spooky!

 I made my own little flower with some wordy paper and distressed that too! If you join in you could win some vintage goodies from Amanda's shop Scrap Rat.

I did join in a bit with the celebrations this year though, as I made these creepy cupcakes! The green doesn't look that green here but it is a bit stronger than that. It's a shame I didn't have any black food colouring as they would of looked even better with black cobwebs on them!

 They are in red, black and purple silicon cake cases!

 I've been busy getting the new kit together for my shop, it comes out tomorrow!
Also made our Christmas cake this week which puts you in a festive mood, it looks good too!

Thanks for popping in and for leaving comments they are much appreciated!! xx

Starry Eyed

 Friday was the day my first Precocious Paper project went up on the blog. I had lots of lovely goodies from Tessa to play with and couldn't decided what to use first! In the end I went with the gorgeous bright stars, I love stars! I thought they would go really well with the photos of the Mickey cake I made and they did! So here's what I made.

 I used some die cut star paper as a mask and misted over it with silver shimmer mist. I haven't used my silver mist that much before as it doesn't show up that much on quite a lot of stuff but it worked really well on the black, I love how it turned out.

 I must say this layout has to be one of my favourites!
If you would like to see Tessa's lovely stars you can here, they come in other colours too!

Sunday was challenge day again at The Studio, this week the challenge was a real tough one! Amanda was scared she would scaring us all away!! It was Are you ready? Your journaling must take up at least 50% of your scrapbook page."
This was difficult for me, as you probably know by now I like quite a lot of white space on my layouts. I had this photo with a funny story behind it so it had to be told. I tried writing the story out in a big block first but with that and the photo on one layout I didn't know what to do with it as it could up so much space! I decided to write it in smaller blocks so it would give me more to play with.

I made it more pretty by putting borders under the blocks of writing and adding trim and other embellishments.

Here's a card I made for a friends Birthday this week, I felt like making it quite pretty!

That's all the crafty things I have to show you at the moment. I have made 50 Christmas cards for my sister too but I haven't got around to photographing them yet, luckily they were nice and simple!

Back soon! xx

The Big Smoke

I don't know where this week has gone!!  I caught my Dad's cold so yet again I haven't been feeling very well this week, how many colds can you have one after another?!

Anyway need to have a bit of a catch up with whats been happen so here goes! First up was the last Challenge at The Studio last Sunday it was a bit different this week. Amanda said ''My house is slowly but surely being taken over by scrapbooking supplies. I'm sure a lot of you feel the same way. It's not physically possible to use them all at the rate I buy them, so I'm always looking for new ways to use things up. This week, I want to see you all WEARING your stash! OK, I don't expect you to make paper ball gowns (although you can if you wish!), but a little something like a piece of jewelery, hair accessory or brooch shouldn't cause you too much trouble :)

So I made a little brooch with some lace and ribbon from my stash. I made little lace flowers with the pink lace and looped the ribbon.

 It does look quite nice on a purple jumper! Or it even brightens up your winter coat!

My weekend in London was lovely, we did lots of site seeing. On Saturday we went to the Thames Barrier which was great to see, I seem to have lots of photos of it, it is odd looking though!

 Dramatic skies!

Then we went on across on the ferry to the other side of it, this is the view from the back, you can just see The Dome or The O2 as it's called now, in the background. The weather improved too!

We then went to Greenwich, we saw the Naval college and went into the mess hall which was amazing.

The whole of the hall, ceiling and walls had painted scene on them. I could lots more photos that I will scrap at some point!
We saw the Greenwich Mean Time, where the time comes from! There were many jokes about 'in the mean time' going around!

On the Sunday we went to Hampstead which was lovely to look at and then we had walk in Golder's Green park. We found that there was like a small zoo there, lots of different animals, these were my favourite though, deer, look at that face!

That was a lot of photos so I think I'll leave it there. I'll be back soon with tomorrows challenge at The Studio (it was a tough one!) and my first Precocious Paper DT project.

It's not a nice day here today so I'm not doing much, I'm off to do something crafty now!

Thanks for looking xx

I won!

Do you remember my layout called Sunny days in my last post that I made for the Sarah's Cards sketch challenge? I only went and won the challenge, didn't I?!! What a lovely surprise, very exciting, and I can now get some free goodies to play with, yay!

I've got a couple more layouts to share with you while I'm here. I made this layout for my shop blog using my kit, Golden Leaves.

I used my new copper shimmer mist on it, it's lovely really shimmery! I like the different textures of this kit.

I saw this fungi had grown in our lawn a few weeks ago, so had to take a photo of it, it's looks a good autumn site.

I made this layout a little while ago but I don't think I've shown you yet. A few weeks ago I felt like getting messy with paints and mists to try out different techniques using them. I had a great time using paint brushes, splashes, brush strokes, an old glue stick lid for the rings, some cross stitch aida fabric (make a great pattern!), piece of card to make paint lines and sequin waste for the mist.  

I did have a different layout in mind for it but it didn't work as well as I thought with it so I did the other layout on a different background and left this background. I was thinking what I could out on it not to cover it up too much so I came up with getting my nephew to do some painting to take photos of it and use his painted hand prints!! He didn't mind he loves painting! 

It kind of looks like my nephew could of done it while he was painting!

I just added some Thickers that I had added paint splodge to and that was all I put on it but I think it works quite well!

I'm off to London tomorrow to see my sister for the weekend which will be nice, it does always seem like we go on the coldest of weekends!! I will have to get my long coat, hat and gloves out I think, if it stays like it is today, I'm sat here with the fire on!!

Keep warm!  I'll be back next week.

Thanks for all your comments, it's great to know I inspire others with what I do! xx

Pleasures

I managed to do some scrapping over this weekend, yesterday I finished my layout for the sketch challenge at Sarah's Cards. I had fun making this layout, it not a sketch I'd usually go for but I'm really pleased with the result. It's good to push you in creating something different. I made a mask for the first rectangle and misted it with yellow mist and then hand stitched around it. I then added some drops of the mist to the left hand side of the layout. I then added more rectangles and then I stitched the bottom one too.
I love this photo I took of my Dad and nephew when we were out for the day in May so I had to scrap it!

I used some embellishments from my ' Summer Splash' kit from my shop. I used from the kit the yellow ribbon, a chipboard frame, the green sequins and a bit of the pretty material for one of the bottom rectangles.

It's Sunday again so there's a new challenge up at The Studio. This weeks challenge was 'Guilty pleasures... everyone's got at least one, surely? What is yours? Feature it on a scrapbook page and tell the world!
Now I'm not sure I really should be confessing to this but my guilty pleasure is the boy band Mcfly!! Lots of teenage girls love them but I secretly love them too!! Their songs are great to sing along too! So here's the layout I made for it.

I used Cosmo papers for this one.

The Pepper Pig cake went down really well everyone was commenting on it and it even tasted nice too!! Here's the card I made for the Birthday girl.

That's it for now I'm off to do more scrapping!
Hope you're enjoying your weekends.
Thanks for looking! xx

Extra, Extra!

This week at The Studio was my week for the Wednesday Extra. I was having a think what I could do for it and was running out of ideas that haven't been done already! While I was looking around for ideas I had a flash of inspiration and thought that I haven't seen anyone try paper weaving in scrapping so I thought I would give it a try! It's quick and easy to do but looks good and it uses up lots of scraps of paper that are lurking in your stash! Here are the layouts I made for it I wanted to do 2 really different layout to show different ways of using weaving on your layouts.
I'm sure most of us did paper weaving at school at some point so I put together a little tutorial to remind you how to do it if you want to take a look it's here.
For this first one I made a big patch of paper weaving with the lovely Cosmo Togetherness papers, they seem to be a favourite of mine at the moment!!

The second one I made small patches of weaving with thinner stripes of paper. This is one of these layout that really does look better in real life!! I've taken loads of photos of it trying to get a better photo of it but it doesn't get any better than this!

I really like this layout in real life, it's a shame it doesn't look that great here, never mind, it looks good in the album!

If you do give it a go I love to see it, put a link in the comments.

Today I have spend the day up to my ears in pink icing!! I was asked to make a 'Pepper Pig' Birthday cake for my nephew's best friend. I don't know if you've ever seen what Pepper looks like but she's a funny little character! Here's the cake I made!

I spent quite a while on it today to get it to look right but Pepper doesn't really look right anyway!!! I'm quite pleased with how it turned out in the end, I really hope Alexa likes it!

More scrapping planned for the weekend so I should have lots to show later!
Thank you very much for your comments, they brighten up my day!!

Have a lovely weekend whatever you get up to! xx

Very exciting

I have to share with you my layout that is featured in no other than Pagemaps! The girls from The Studio were kindly asked by the lovely Becky Fleck to make examples for October's Pagemaps. We all jumped at the chance! We each have our own sketch to play with. I was very excited to be part of it as I love Becky's sketches and I was disappointed by the sketch I got! This is the layout I made from it:

You can check out all the sketches and layouts here. Was a bit of a shame my name is spelt a bit wrong though!!

Next up Sunday's challenge at The Studio was 'We'd like to challenge you to create a page featuring your home. Maybe your favourite spot, the flowers in your garden, or even the leaking pipes under the bath. Just make it an authentic snapshot of your life right now!'
Here's the layout I made for it:

My front door! I journaled the things that make it home to me like sitting buy the fire on a cold winter's night and my own bed!!
My mum bought my a great present the other day...

...lots of doilies and in 4 sizes too!! So I had to use one of them on my layout! 
I had a great weekend it was busy but lovely too! We had our family picnic at Westonbirt arboretum The weather wasn't too bad it didn't rain so we were lucky!

It was lovely seeing all the trees that were turning lovely colours.

I took lots of photos of them!

On Sunday we had our family photo shoot which went ok, he took lots of photos so hopefully there will be some nice ones out of them all! Then we had a big family Sunday roast as it was my aunties Birthday, which was lovely.

I've got more to share so I'll be back in the week. I've even being enjoying a bit of scrapping today so I'll be back with that too!
Thanks for looking as always! xx

A bit of a week

It's been a bit of a week for me this week, I haven't been feeling great as the cold I had 4 weeks ago come back, not so bad though luckily but it's still making me feel rough. I have had a busy week too, lots to get done. I have had to launch my new kit for my shop and get that sorted and make a layout with it.I have to do my challenge for Sunday for The Studio and I also forgot to do something else for The Studio so that is going to have to be today's project. I had to cancel some of the things I was meant to be doing as it was too much for me as this cold leaves me with less energy than usual and I need to rest.
On top of all this I have a busy weekend too as my sister and brother-in-law are coming to stay for the weekend. We are having our annual family picnic tomorrow, it's happening a bit later than usual so fingers crossed for the weather!! Than on Sunday we are having a family photo shoot, it was a present my brother give my mum for her 60th Birthday.

Anyway lets get on to the crafty things!
I made this layout from a sketch the lovely Reija made. I follow Reija blog as I love what she creates and she came out with a sketch the other day so I had to give it a go. Its great she made this sketch as it was very much her style so it pushed me to create a layout that I wouldn't normally create.

I used sequin waste to mist over to create the little circles, love this effect I will be doing it again!

I also hand stitched the 3 lines under the photo. I'm quite pleased with how this turned out as it different. I like experimenting with different styles!

Next up I launched a new kit for my shop today as it's the 1st October!
I'm quite pleased with this kit, it's called Golden Leaves and it full of earthy colours with a splash of gold, very autumnal! It was added to the shop this morning, here it is...

Hope you like it too!

This is a layout I made with the kit.

I loved using the crepe paper to make some texture, I also screwed up the leaves so they look old and crispy! It is difficult on these dull days to get good photos of layouts isn't it!!

The other thing I must show you was my challenge from Sunday for The Studio. The challenge was 'Fairy tale challenge! This week I challenge you to scrapbook a perfect day... that hasn't happened yet! If you could spend a day doing anything, what would it be?'

So if I could have a perfect day I would spend it with African Elephants. I have always loved them

 so to see them in the wild and maybe help out at a elephant orphanage would be a dream come true, I'll get there one day! Here's my layout.

Right I better go and get on with today's project and I've got to make some cupcakes for our family picnic and hopefully have a bit of a rest before my sister and Brother-in-law arrive this evening, wish me luck!!!

Have a great weekend whatever you doing.

Thanks for looking xx