A night on the town and two soccer grand finals.

I've got a few more pages to share with you today, starting with one I created using another sketch from The Memory Nest.

Here it is:

I dug into my stash looking (not very hopefully, I might add!) for a paper that might match my dress.  The night skyline paper gave me the inspiration for how to take this page.  It's kind of an inside joke, really.  Number one, Newcastle really doesn't have a city skyline quite like that.  Number two, we got dressed up for our anniversary dinner before we decided where we were eating, and ended up at a very casual (but still very nice!!) pub on the foreshore.  Number three, being daylight savings, and us being the early to bed types, it was barely dark by the time we got home!

 And a couple of pages for Rohan about his soccer grand final last year (they lost) . . .

. . . and the year before (they won!)

Lots of good fun, mainly using my Counterfeit Kit. Hope to catch up with 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!

Scraptoberfest

Many times on this blog in the past I've talked about how I love sketch and colour challenges as a way of focussing on using my stash instead of spending money building up my stash. (like here) I've proven this to be true over the last month as I've forced encouraged myself to partake in a number of challenges, instead of spending all my spare time on Youtube, which invariably leads to me looking for particular supplies on my favourite internet Scrapbooking sites.
But I've got another reason to add why I love these challenges so much . . . they can really help when your creativity is low.  A sketch is the perfect solution when you feel like you've gone to your "go to" designs to death, and a colour challenge is a great help when you can't see past the fact that your daughter is wearing (yet again!!!) pink, and you don't want your page to mimic the Barbie isle at Kmart.

This month, I've come across not just a sketch AND a colour challenge, but a chance to participate in 4 challenges AT ONCE!!! If you're visiting from any of the sites involved in Scraptoberfest, you know about this already, but if not, here's all the challenges:

The Memory Nest has this sketch:

My Scraps and More has this colour palette:

Scrap our Stash asks us to use 2 different types of washi tape.

And finally, Challenge YOUrself asks us to "include yourself in the photo".

The option is to do any or all of these challenges individually, but I took the combined option of all 4!
Here it is . . .

I had a photo of myself ready to scrap (tick!), with neutral-enough colours that I could use the colour palette (tick!).  By using two of the three photos from the morning, I was able to easily use the sketch (tick!) and the royal blue and pink washi tapes complete the final challenge (tick, tick, tick, tick!)

 I decided to scrap the final photo from the morning separately, as I had a story I wanted to document but didn't have a specific photo to go with it . . .

. . . about how I worked my childcare magic on my niece that weekend, who's always been really shy with us.  To the amusement of all my family, she now loves her "Uncle Julie".

I'm still working with my September Counterfeit Kit, and both pages use those "Best of" Crate Paper papers, which makes me very happy!

Thanks for stopping by, and don't forget to let me know you've stopped by.  I'd love to hear what your favourite type of challenge is!