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!

February Counterfeit Kit

Hi and welcome back as I attempt to get back into the craft room for the first time this year! If you're a Shimelle fan you'll know she's recently brought back her alter ego "Glitter Girl" and one of the first videos was on how to get back into scrapbooking after a break. 
Other than watching Glitter Girl, here's my three tips for getting back into scrapbooking . . .

1. Clean your desk.  After a couple of months of disuse, this was a bit of an archaeology dig.  Among other things, I came across my last crafty purchases, not yet put away, random stacks of mail, including an overdue bill (oops!), with the last project I was working on buried at the bottom. A clean desk always gets me itching to start a new project!
2. Print off some new photos.  I don't print at home, but tend to get them done in batches every few months.  That's what I plan on doing after finishing this post! 
3. Gather some new supplies. What I mean to say is, gather some supplies together in a new way! And that's where the Counterfeit Kit Club comes in, with inspiration each month to help us do just that.  

Here's what they came up with for February, from "Mind the Scrap":

I loved the colours, but didn't have a whole lot of supplies in common with the inspiration kit this month. So I just took the colours and started from there . . .

I was happy to leave my kit just at the paper this month, and pull embellishments and alphas as I go, but I couldn't resist having a go at those Maggie Holmes hearts . . .

My version is made entirely from my stash of paper strips! How fun!

Thanks for visiting . . . but before you go, why don't you share your strategies for getting back into crafting after a break?

November Counterfeit Kit Challenge Member Blog Hop

Hi and welcome to my stop on the CKC member blog hop!

You should have arrived from the always talented Susanne's blog, but if you haven't, you can always head over to the CKC website and start from the beginning!

This month, we've been given the freedom to show anything we wanted to using our kit.  If you've visited recently, you might remember that my kit this month is a somewhat expanded version of a Shimelle/Glitter Girl challenge, Layouts with Limitations. 

The recipe for the final page in that challenge is to take your last full 12" background sheet that you've chosen as a background, then layer up your smaller pieces of paper as a mat for a single photo.

Having a bit more paper in my kit, I've followed this recipe . . . times three!  Using the same photo . . . one page for each of my children's albums . . .

At this point I had built the layers.  I then went through all the embellishments in the kit and chose ones that I thought would best match each page, a bit like Shimelle in her follow-up video, Batch Scrapbooking.

And here's the final products . . .

No prizes for guessing which page is going into my daughter's album! And here's that polka-dot I saved from being cut up in my last post - I'm so happy seeing it as the background that it deserves to be!

Thanks for stopping by, or should I say hopping by!  But before you move on to the lovely Kelly's blog, I hope you'll take the time to say hello and let me know you were here!

The answer is: stickers, circles and wood veneers.

 
{The question is: what do the first three pages from my November Counterfeit Kit have in common?}

As I mentioned last post, the creation of my Counterfeit kit this month was somewhat inspired by a challenge of Shimelle/Glitter Girl's.

Although my kit is bigger, it made sense to start my first couple of pages in a similar way to hers, which started with a 3-photo layout, followed by a 2-photo page and finishing with a 1-photo page.

Here's my three-photo page . . .

and my two-photo page . . .

Both these pages follow the formula of the original sketch, although I've used border stickers in place of the paper strips that Shimelle used.
This is when I deviated, and  decided to do another photo-heavy layout . . .

Page number four is a single photo page, but doesn't particularly follow Shimelle's formula. I was inspired by the floral paper and the rosette, and wanted to make a feature out of them both.  But it was at this point I hit a problem with the "rules" I had created for my self (to not add any papers to the kit)- I really couldn't bear to cut into my full 12" sheet of that lovely Shimelle polka dot when I knew I had a perfectly adequate 6" sheet of the same paper! Well, I thought to myself, as the crew of the Black Pearl would say, they're really more like "guidelines", and I've saved myself that polka dot to potentially use as a background for another page . . .

Thanks for visiting, and I hope to have a few more pages to share with you soon!

First 2 pages with May Counterfeit Kit

I've been struggling with the whole "vintage" vibe of my Counterfeit Kit this month . . . perhaps I don't have the "right" photos to scrap, or perhaps it's just not my style?  And I think I've definitely been trying too hard to focus on using all the brown papers I included this month.
Anyway, I've managed to have a couple of pages ready to show you today, with a couple more coming soon.

First up, a page about the present Maddy gave her Dad for Christmas last year, where I quite by accident used some "traditional" red and green.

For the next page, I used the Shimelle sketch from one of the Counterfeit Kit NSD challenges:

 This sketch to me is the sort of Shimelle-inspired page that I've done so often that I've almost forgotten where the inspiration comes from. 

A bit of stamping gave the Jenni Bowlin tags a soccer twist.

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

June Counterfeit Kit Wrap-up

First up, how about a quick re-cap of the pages I've already posted:

So that makes five of the possible nine I had originally planned out. I decided to ditch the two pages I didn't have all the photos for, and attempt the two doubles, both of which had seven landscape oriented photos.  I decided to try something a bit different for both of them, making a one-photo "traditional" page, supported by a page using divided page protectors, Project Life-style.

The left side of this first page is inspired by this sketch from Shimelle:

I'm not sure if readers from non-cricketing countries will recognise the play on words in my title for this page. "Howzat" (how's that) is commonly heard on the cricket pitch as an appeal to the umpire, and also the name of the Sports Centre where Angus had his birthday party. 

This one is from Christmas . . . a very rainy afternoon, so we spent it indoors trying out all our Christmas games, books and craft!

A very astute reader might remember that I said both of my doubles had seven photos . . . well they did, but one of the photos mixed in with my Christmas ones was technically a Boxing Day photo, and, I thought, deserved a page all to itself . . . the back of the divided page protector, in fact!

I think the only items from the kit on this page were the journalling cards, slide mounts and kraft butterflies.  Everything else is off-cuts, 6" papers and other items from my stash. I was especially please to remember to use the Echo Park "sewing" themed stickers, as they matched perfectly!

I'm ready to call this kit done, and move onto the next one.  How about you?