May Scrapbooking Top 50

 Friends, before we get onto the crafty business at hand, I'd like to let you know that I will be participating in the Act For Peace Ration Challenge during Refugee Week.  From 18-25 June I will be eating the same rations as a Syrian refugee - just a small amount of rice, lentils, chick pease, sardines, oil and kidney beans.  That's it - no meat, coffee or alcohol.  (And between you and me the hardest bit of all that is the no coffee!!!)
Sponsorship in this challenge will help provide urgently needed food rations, healthcare and education to Syrian refugees.  If you are interested in donating, or just want to know a little bit more, please visit my sponsorship page:

I am taking the Act for Peace Ration Challenge during Refugee Week and opening my eyes to what it's like for refugees to survive on rations. From 18-25 June I will be eating the same rations as a Syrian refugee - just a small amount of rice, lentils, chick peas, sardines, oil and kidney beans. That's it. No meat, coffee or alcohol. - See more at: https://actforpeace.rationchallenge.org.au/fundraisers/juliehearn#sthash.gzdFbM4L.dpuf

I am taking the Act for Peace Ration Challenge during Refugee Week and opening my eyes to what it's like for refugees to survive on rations. From 18-25 June I will be eating the same rations as a Syrian refugee - just a small amount of rice, lentils, chick peas, sardines, oil and kidney beans. That's it. No meat, coffee or alcohol. - See more at: https://actforpeace.rationchallenge.org.au/fundraisers/juliehearn#sthash.gzdFbM4L.dpuf

I am taking the Act for Peace Ration Challenge during Refugee Week and opening my eyes to what it's like for refugees to survive on rations. From 18-25 June I will be eating the same rations as a Syrian refugee - just a small amount of rice, lentils, chick peas, sardines, oil and kidney beans. That's it. No meat, coffee or alcohol. - See more at: https://actforpeace.rationchallenge.org.au/fundraisers/juliehearn#sthash.gzdFbM4L.dpuf

 https://actforpeace.rationchallenge.org.au/fundraisers/juliehearn

And now we return to regularly shecduled programming . . .

After completing 18 school photos, production-line style (which you can read about in my previous post) I was ready for something a bit different! A challenge, perhaps?

I chose this month's sketch from Scrapbooking Top 50:

How cute is that!

here's my entry:

I ended up binge die-cutting for  this one - creating whole pages of leaf fronds, flowers and butterflies, which I think took longer than the rest of the page put together!

So happy with how this one turned out!  This page also marks the three-quarter mark of my 100-page spending freeze, so that's exciting! 

Thanks for visiting and I hope to see you again soon!

More Counterfeit Kit pages - with a bit of help from a couple of friends.

So you might or might not know that I fractured a bone in my foot at the start of the year.  After 11 weeks of hobbling around in a CAM boot, I'm very much looking forward to having another X-ray in a few days and (God willing!) being able to Get. Out. Of. That. Boot.
Unfortunately it's not guaranteed, and it could be that I spend many more weeks in the boot and ultimately even get it pinned, but I see no reason not to hope for the best at this stage. 
Knowing that my life might get back to normal soon (in terms of housework, exercise, paid work, etc etc) I'm aware that my time in the craft room might soon cut back.  So I'm trying to get as many pages done for my spending freeze goal as possible.

Here's what I've done in the last few days . . .

 First up, another page using the same "first day of school" photo, this time for Maddy's album.

Then I decided I needed a bit of inspiration, when I was struck by this lovely sketch at The Memory Nest.

Here's the page I created:

 Heard of "Christmas in July?" Although come to think of it, those of you in the Northern Hemisphere might not be aware of it's existence as a "thing" - it was created so we southerners could truly appreciate all the cold-weather Christmas trimmings like baked dinners and eggnog without doing it in the middle of a sweltering summer. 
Anyway, our kids and their friends wanted to twist it a bit - they had enjoyed an Easter joke-making session so much they wanted to repeat it - hence Easter in September!

The most common way I scrapbook multiple photos these days is to make a traditional page hero-ing one or two photos, and place the rest in a pocketed page protector.

In this case I ended up using both sides of the page-protector and making two "traditional" pages.

I was scrapping with my good buddy Glitter Girl while making this  second "traditional" page (by which of course I mean that I had Youtube running in the background), and she was scrapping with a stamp.  So of course I spent much too long looking for a dress-form stamp I thought I owned, before coming to the conclusion that I had borrowed it from a friend.  So I used a different stamp and cut a dress-form on my Silhouette.  Anyway I'm very grateful to my Superhero friend for her timely inspiration!

But wait, there's more!

Because of course I was working on a Circus layout, and knew I had some circus stamps as well.  I was too far along in the process to include a clown stamp, but I used the big ball stamp in both my background and my cluster.  Happy days!

Phew! Thanks for visiting.  I'm heading back to the craft desk, and I hope you get to this weekend as well!

100 page spending freeze - January progress.

For a while there it looked like I was only going to get 2 pages made this month, and at a page a fortnight, to make 100 pages it would take . . . yikes! 4 YEARS!?!?!

Luckily my progress did speed up at the end of the month and I have three more pages to show you, all using my "expanded" version of Cocoa Vanilla Free Spirit . . . 

The journaling for this page will tell the story about how our friends offered to look after Tibbets (our rabbit) for us while we were away.  Their youngest was very shy and wouldn't talk to us at all . . . and then unexpectedly fell asleep on the floor in the middle of the action!

Back to the photos taken on the weekend of my parent's 50th wedding anniversary . . .

One last project to bring my total up to 6 . . .

With my seldom-used Silhouette pens, I made a set of labels for my home-made kombucha.  I made 3 for each flavour, and I've numbered them to help us drink the oldest ones first (and in the hopes that my children will manage to finish one bottle before they start on the next one, but we'll see!)

Killing my November counterfeit kit.

I'm pretty happy with the pages I made with my November kit.  I made all the pages I had planned for Angus's album . . .

I'll often make my titles on my Silhouette, but something I haven't done for a while is give them a bit of a lift with Silhouette-brand chipboard.  So I kept working on pages until I had enough titles to fill a cutting mat . . .

I still had quite a bit of paper left over, so then I pulled a few more photos, this time from Rohan's albums . . .

I still have journaling and dates to add on most of the pages, and the last few for Rohan still need their titles, but I've done enough to pack the scraps of the kit away . . .

That's because I have some exciting plans on the horizon for the New Year, including a big spending freeze challenge for myself, starting with an "Expand a Collection" kit I've made, with a video here and on Youtube coming soon to show you how I've done it! 

Scrapbook Boutique April Challenge

With Mothers Day just around the corner, I found the perfect inspiration to go with my photos from Mother's Day last year . . . this beautiful Mood Board from Scrapbook Boutique:

Here's my page:

Maddy surprised me with a "spa and manicure kit" which she'd made using recipes she found on Pinterest.  What a great Mother's Day present!

I created my background using gelatos, and used my Silhouette to cut the lovely filigree roses.

Thanks for visiting!

August Counterfeit Kit: "Good Morning, Vietnam!"

I'm so excited to be joining in the Counterfeit Kit Challenge again this month . . .

The inspiration kit, "Globe Trotter" from Scrappy Canary fits in perfectly with my plans to scrap the photos of my oldest son's recent school trip to Vietnam!

Here's Rohan, the guest designer himself.  To be honest, I'm a bit nervous about this album, after all, they're his stories to tell, and I'm not sure how well our ideas are going to match.  When I express this to Rohan, he says " think of it as a collaborative approach" to "developing my art-making practice" and things of that nature, which gives me some confidence in his ability to write an HSC art essay, if nothing else!

But let's move onto something I'm not nervous about, creating the kit!  I've titled it, most originally, 

"Good Morning, Vietnam!"

For our papers, I already had the Pink Paisley "Atlas" 12" pad, so I've chosen quite a few of those, with the rest at my disposal if necessary.  The rest of the papers are from a variety of soures, but largely from Studio Calico "Brighton Pier".  Not the most obvious collections to pair together, I know, but enough of the papers work with each other that I'm confident it will be just fine.
I also bought the Brighton Pier 6" pad (on special, of course!), in order to use the smaller patterns for backing my die-cuts.

We've chosen a dark kraft cardstock as our background, and black cardstock for all die-cuts, including titles.  The die-cuts we've chosen so far include a map of Vietnam, a plane and some geo-tags to cover the travel theme.   For the specifically Vietnamese flavour, I've found some beautiful lantern shapes, as well as a water lily and some lovely fans.  (Although to be honest, I can't remember if the fans meet the Rohan criteria for Vietnam authenticity, but we'll see if they turn up on a page!).

That's where we are up to at the moment, I'm still not sure how we're going to fit the journaling in for example, although seeing those envelopes in the inspiration kit just now  might just be the thing we need!

Thanks for visiting, and I hope to see you again soon!

Tasmania album update

Time for another update on my Tasmania album.  I've gone through and created all the title cards and journaling cards for the pocketed pages.  First I went through and did the ones that will face a traditional page, so that the papers and die cuts matched.
 All the title cards are cut on my Silhouette and backed with cardstock or some of the more solid patterned papers left over from the traditional pages.

Then I went back and did the rest.  At this point I figured it was time to focus on using my manufacturer strips and other thin strips and smaller pieces.  After all, if I can't use them on a project like this, what's the point in keeping them?

If you've visited an earlier post about my Tasmania album, you might remember that each "traditional" page contained the same elements for continuity: a little bit of the striped paper, tickets, cameras, white fronds and cardstock "sequins".  I decided that putting all of those elements onto a 4x6 card along with journaling or a title would be way too much, so each card has one or more of those elements, but not all of them.

I've also finished the titles on my traditional pages.  For some I used the letters cut out of the title cards,

 some I've cut out in black (same font and size),

 and others I decided don't need a title at all.

What's left? Title page and journaling. Yikes!  I don't normally leave journaling until last (especially on such a big project) so let's hope I'll see it through!