2016 Cat Lovers Blog Hop and Shimelle Challenge #05

Phew! I made it!

Finishing that layout was a bit too Ride of the Valkyries for my liking...but then again:

I wasn't sure I would finish in time to enter their 2016 Cat Lovers Blog Hop hosted by Janis over at Her Peaceful Garden.  I'm not entirely assured I made the deadline despite being able to use the linkup.

A migraine all weekend hasn't been kind, so I had to combine my entry for this Blog Hop along with one of the challenges on Shimelle's  blog going all weekend since she's having an online scrap booking party.

Challenge 05 was all about the outdoors, but I'm getting ahead of myself.  I'll come back to that part soon. 

I had a great idea for a card, but if I had implemented it and then attempted to make a layout for Shimelle's challenge, I wouldn't have finished both.  Fortunately, I had two photos and a story to tell which involved cats and was outdoorsy so challenge 05 would be the one.

The challenges are open all week. But finishing one today has a little bonus in store!

Guest artist Helen De Ram presented this challenge and it was about getting the great outdoors scrapped in bright colours.  I'm all for colour so off I went.  I loved her layout and it had some aspects I don't normally do like that section of word stickers to fill in the centre, but I decided to be brave and  try it.

A fairly important part of the layout was a journalling card separating the photos.  I'm making an effort since #The20Project to use something besides thickers for titles sometimes.  I rarely separate photos, but I wanted to try that too.  My result is below.  Not my finest work, but I'm fairly happy...besides my shaky almost illegible handwriting (really bad shakes today)

I decided to attempt to use just supplies from Shimelle's collections (in a vain hope to make things easier by limiting supplies) and to include at least something from each collection - I even managed some B-Sides from her christmas collection (I don't celebrate christmas, but lots of the b=sides were so lovely!).

A few close ups...you might be able to decipher a word or two of my writing if you look  hard enough!!

PhiPha aka Ophelia aka Crafty Cat is feisty and sassy and frequently explores the roof despite her...rather...ample physique.  Poor Fossy was 14.5 years old when these photos were taken, and I don't recall him ever being an avid tree climber, BUT if PhiPha does something, he refuses to be outdone.

Sadly, Fossy passed away early this month, so I wanted to make a layout about him, but not sad stories.

So what happens the morning after the dust from the craftnado has settled?  You survey the craftermath and briefly consider some sort of salvage operation.  you soon come to your senses and add stuff to the layout - a couple more words to the middle area and some enamel shapes to each embellishment cluster.  I had better get it into the album before I do anything else!!

The 20 Project - Day 10 and Scrapbook Roulette Challenge Video Hop

Yes I have jumped straight back into page 10 of The 20 Project (bypassing 2-9), but I have a very good reason!  

That reason is my participation in a video hop with 7 other lovely ladies.  This is the first video on my YouTube channel and some very dire technical dramas resulted in less than ideal filming conditions.  It would not have happened at all were it not for one of my sisters (thank you!!)

I had also planned to do something else for my first videos, but in the end it doesn’t matter.  I have begun and the next video will be even better.  I'll come back to those other ones.

What is Scrapbook Roulette?

Scrapbook Roulette is when a number of items or techniques are randomly selected and must be used on the layout.  Claire has been doing this for a while and selected 5 embellishments for us to use.  We were free to use whichever paper, cardstock, theme, photos, alphas or mixed media, but we could ONLY use the embellishments from the draw.  Pretty tough since stickers and enamel dots were not allowed among other things.

The 5 items were:
Ribbon
Vellum
Ephemera
Flair Badges (or brads for those who didn't have badges)
Roller Phrase Stamp 

I often have days where so much stuff goes wrong that you couldn't make it up.  This was one of those days.  Every possible technical disaster happened.  Eventually I headed over to my sister's house with my stuff.  She is set up to record videos for YouTube.  Even then we had some dramas and her stuff wasn't handy so I really appreciated her pulling it all out and working the camera for me...not to mention all that editing!

There will be a next time, but I will make sure I have things set up in a more or less permanent arrangement in my craft area the way I want it.

Here is the line up of everyone who took part in this fun challenge:

Rosie Howe
Claire Murphy
Allison Scianna 
Ariana Yvette Fizudeen 
Alex Trofimov  <---- You are here 
Audrey Yeager 
Katelyn Clary
Kristina Sorge

Some of these lovely ladies also blog, so please show them some love there as well. 

Ariana - www.thecraftyways.com
Audrey - http://audreysreflection.blogspot.com/
Katelynn - www.grayflorals.com
Khristina - www.redefinedkreative.blogspot.com

Day 10 of The 20 Project.

Day 10...Today's challenge is all about not hoarding the pretty paper.  Shimelle's layout was fairly simple and she let the paper did the talking.  It was a very striking sheet of paper and while I had it in my stash, for ME it wasn't so special.  I think I even bought it for the B-side!  

Shimelle also used a special occasion photo for her layout and I was not.  This makes a difference to paper choice I think.

When I thought about all the papers that are 'too good' to use - the vellums, acetates and glittered sheets - are always among the first to come to mind.  I DO buy multiple sheets if I really like them and lately I keep returning to the raindrop speciality paper (called Chai) from Shimelle's second collection - True Stories.  I'm please to say I've used the film strips ( Shortbread) and the glittered diagonal stripe ( Blueberry Muffin) before (on the b side though!).

It's at this point that things happen fast.  I start being peppered with ideas and since I had a story I have long wanted to tell (involving rain), I thought I should just use ALL the papers, right?

I thought I'd try sticking vellum strips in the white areas here and there (ripping them off if I didn't like the way it looked).  The cloud vellum (Earl Grey) is more sparse than the one with hearts (Chamomile), but I needed Earl Grey/the cloud one.  In fact, after deciding to undertake this hybrid project of sorts, I kept finding cloud/umbrella/raindrop motifs in my stash.  Go figure!

I have noticed after I've had a few weeks (or longer) away from scrapbooking, I find myself wanting to use EVERYTHING...maybe because I can't be sure when I will scrap again and so I want to cram all my favourite motifs on the page...hich just doesn't work and leaves me feeling...less happy with my layout than I might otherwise.

The other thing I may have done a little differently, is cutting a bigger box from the Chai/raindrop paper...and maybe smaller mats for the others...and reining in my wild embellishment sticking frenzy a little bit.

Otherwise I'm reasonably happy and the shorter the break between pages, the easier it is for me to find my rhythm and style and create more smoothly

My next BIG challenge is teaching a group of up to 20 kids at my son's school next month for what they call Passion Day.  Perhaps it should be called Obsession Day instead?

Shimelle's The 20 Project - Day 1

So having just finished a couple of layouts, I feel ready to actually play along with Shimelle's newest class - The 20 Project

The question is how.  It's an interesting project!  I could do what Shimelle has done to give her the basis for her 20 layouts in terms of a To-Do List.  I could also just adapt Shimelle's To-Dos to my own needs since I have so much I want to get done that I'm almost certain they'll be relevant!

In any case, I'm hoping to do a layout each day.  As I mentioned before, I tend to work from sketches right now due to my rather indifferent state of health, so taking that part out of the process means I can focus my energy on picking supplies and getting the job done.

So my "take home points" or ideas for Day 1 are:

2016 album
Bold/bright background paper
Themed supplies
One word: Sassa! <3 <3 <3

The 2016 album is a great place to start given I only have one story done!  (and yes that's the Dear Lizzy story!).

I love a bold patterned paper so I'll work that in.  If I can work in a theme then great but not going to try too hard.  Whether I dip into my precious Sassafras stash remains to be seen. 

*cue elevator music while she hunts for supplies...*

OK, I found a photo from January and I can go themey!

I always buy paper and embellishments with glasses (for obvious reasons) but haven't scrapped too many glasses photos (although from memory there are quite a few).

I quickly found these papers:

I didn't bother looking further, but I'm sure there's more.

I quickly narrowed them down to the Maggie Holmes one from Open Book and the Amy Tangerine one from Better Together.  The next choice was harder, but I had in my mind the idea of a black and white background and a riot of colour in paper layers and embellishments.

I needed an outer mat for sturdiness due to the glasses paper being from a paper pad as well as wanting to introduce my colours.

My photo just doesn't have much colour.  One pair of glasses is pink (my crafting glasses) and this shows in one photo, and the coral red stripe of my dress is just barely visible.

I kinda wanted pink and red and maybe some orange...along with maybe aqua?

Shimelle's Starshine collection was the perfect match.  I needed two mats to tie in all the colour on the front.

I have lots of glasses embellies and stamps and dies (oh my!) as I said before, but clearly I can't JUST use those!

I rarely scrap photos of myself and I love girly stuff so flowers and hearts and stars will make up the majority.

I'm really glad I didn't give myself a time limit!  I have spent all afternoon trying to decide whether or not to sacrifice any of my Sassafras Foldies like Shimelle.  I have about 1.5 sheets so they're quite precious!  

I have loads of Sassa stickers and paper tho so I might compromise and use those and save the Foldies.

Initially I dismissed the idea straight away, but those pesky Foldies kept whispering to me.  I know I'm not the only person whose supplies speak to her...surely?

The colours in Sassafras papers should work really well with the other stuff I've chosen...as does Better Together and Dear Lizzy's Documentary or even Happy Place (but probably not all mixed together tho stranger things have happened).

Hmm...what was I saying about not mixed together?  And saving those Foldies?  Ahem!  

Here's my layout

I used the Better Together 6x6 paper pad and found I could have my pink glasses paper after all.  I know I went a little crazy with photo mats - besides the one from Better Together, the next two (multi polka dots and red floral) are from Starshine and the last two (light blue grid and pink and red text) are from Happy Place.

I used 2-and-a-bit foldies and the bottom one has had numerous surgical procedures performed on it until it would sit just so.  I added a Sassa border strip to each cluster and half an orange floral sticker.  A wood veneer piece and sticker from Pink Paislee C'est La Vie and gold mist later I felt kinda finished.  

OK more like I had to stop myself adding more, but I am actually kinda happy with this page!

I'll leave you with a few close ups of the embellishments and hope to finish days 2 and 3 by the end of Monday or Tuesday when the prompt for Day 4 should be out!

 

Day 2 and 3 have been a bit trickier to pull together in terms of bringing ideas, supplies and photos together but stay tuned to see how I get on!

Meeting Dear Lizzy - Layouts

I finally finished the layout I began when I got to meet Dear Lizzy  in April.  Healing has been a slow crawl and still not fully recovered sensation in my fingers, BUT Tori Bissell had a moodboard challenge going in her FB group Scrap Your Scraps that finished at the end of July.

This is how my layout looked after I was done with my left hand painting and stamping:

 This is Tori's July Moodboard:

Do you see why I chose to revive this particular layout?  Not quite?  OK here is the class sample (without the black ink line on the left):

Kinda hard to make it out, but one of the papers used (top area) is an abstract pink and yellow which reminded me a little of graffiti.

I decided to scrap the photos taken on the day with this layout (and another one).  They're not entirely my style so it seems to make sense to use photos of that occasion with them.  I stuck with Dear Lizzy collections and almost everything was from Happy Place.

I started with this page even though it would probably come second in the order of pages that tell the story.  (Chronologically it came first, but makes more sense second in terms of the story - just to confuse matters!)

After colouring a few more cameras I started chopping and sticking and ended up with a page that looked like this:

The other 12x12 layout I thought needed some misting.  As you can see from the one above, plenty of cast off spray got all over my first page and photos etc.  I decided just to go with it!

Not thrilled with the way the misting turned out - in fact I'm not overly thrilled with either layout, but it's always the way after a long break so I try and look on the positive that I have another story for my album and have my feet wet again.

Now for the insert to sit between the layouts.  It holds a 2 sided card Lizzy signed, along with a PL card from her Neapolitan collection that I took along.  I added a card with lots of journaling and some more photos with just a bit of embellishment.

So I guess all that remains is to get this into the order they appear in my 2016 album

And flip the insert to see the other page:

Hopefully my bit of camera colouring counts for the 30 Day Colouring Challenge.  Besides a bit of colouring I did in hospital during my infusion last month, I haven't managed to do much (again!).  

Craftermath after these layouts isn't as bad as usual and I'm slowly rearranging things to work more efficiently in my space.  Hoping to be back with more crafty goodness soon!

***PS the date was SUPPOSED to be April not March so I had to go back and fix the layouts. Boo.

New Crafty Toys and more!

Do you ever feel as though you have so much you want to do and so little time? 

Yeah that’s me at the moment!

Anyway I’m soon to do something I’ve been itching to do for a long time and that’s make some videos on my YouTube channel.  We have been experimenting for a long time with lighting, angles and so on to offer the best quality videos we can given our lack of professional equipment!

The first thing on offer I believe will be a couple of videos putting my newest toy (Heidi Swapp’s MINC Machine) through its paces.

I’m still discovering new and exciting things this baby can do!

Here’s a little teaser of Small Crafty Dude giving it a workout.  It really is child’s play!!

It's Back! The 30 Day Colouring Challenge

Don't you just love Kathy Racoosin from The Daily Marker?  She is so cheerful and always makes me smile.  Kathy is also really encouraging of others.  So important I think!  Not to mention her incredible colouring work.

Every so often she hosts a colouring challenge where you attempt to colour for just a few minutes each day for 30 days.  This is her fifth one and each day there is something new on her blog.

Ok so today is 6 July here but in my defense, it's still 5th in USA!

I'll TRY to do a better job this time around!

Meanwhile, PLEASE visit her blog or instagram and check out her work.  I'd love to know if you play along too!

Quiet on the crafty front?

Well yes, but by no means dead!

I admit not a lot was happening until a sympathy card was required for the loss of a friend's pet.  I felt out of touch so I needed a reliable standby,  An easy yet effective technique so I turned to the acetate/packaging technique.  An oldie, but a goody.  One we usually learn as we start out on our crafty journey, but is often overlooked as we learn more traditional methods of watercolouring.

This friend likes purple so I used several Distress Inks along with some simple die cutting and not much layering.

We still grieve the loss of one of our cats who died several years ago so we know what she was going through.

  

Other things to look out for are posts (and hopefully videos) playing with my new Minc machine, news about my Copic Certification and giveaway so be sure to check back! 

Happy (Inter)National Scrapbooking Day!

Yes it's an actual thing! 

(hope its OK to use this graphic - not sure who to give credit to)

It's the first Saturday in May, but scrapbookers tend to take the whole weekend to celebrate!   And yes I'm posting this on Sunday, but there are challenges running all weekend.   Shimelle is declaring the whole weekend and that's good enough for me!

So what am *I* doing?  You'll   be sorry you asked!

Adele Toomey aka Inkie Quill had a 12 hour live stream on Youtube which was fun...along with challenges in her Facebook group.  Hopefully I can create something.  Weekends are catch-up days.  Lots of washing and jobs.  Boo!

I thought I would give myself a semi-scrappy job.  This:

And believe me when I tell you that it's the most flattering angle of this disaster area.    So why don't I do something crafty and fuuuun?  Why indeed?



Turns out my excitement to get my stitches out on Thursday was short lived.  Yes this Crafty Mama has an infection in her incision.  

Probably started a couple of days before, but I was being optimistic and hoping it was just over-ripe stitches getting irritated.

Honestly, who gets an infection 11 days post-op?  Immunosuppressed peeps that's who.   Double boo. 

So how much scrappy tidying did I do yesterday?  Ummm...not an awful lot so I shall make an earnest effort today as I wait for more of Shimelle's challenges. I also heard rumours that her sparkly friend is going to make an appearance as part of the celebrations!  Oooh!

So what are YOUR plans?

Surgeries and Scrappy Celebrities

Hello my crafty friends!

Long time no...blog. Or craft for that matter.

Let me give you a wave:

So what happened? I hear you ask.  Well its a long story as things always seem to be with me.

Start of April I got juiced up and unlike my last infusion, this one seemed to be working well I was feeling better until...about mid month I lost feeling in my thumb, index and middle fingers combined with pain electric shock sensation etc.

I did what I always do and ignored it.  This approach worked well for 48 hours as symptoms ramped up to full intensity and had me climbing the walls.  I was pretty sure I had carpal tunnel syndrome but typically symptoms are intermittent and stop when you "shake it off shake it off shake it off" (sorry!)

Ironically it was faster and easier to get in to see my hand surgeon than my GP (who I have an indefinite referral with given all the work he has done on my left wrist).

He confirmed my suspicions, declined my request for an enormous steroid shot into the affected area and sent me off for nerve testing.

Several days later testing showed severe carpal tunnel syndrome - to the point even the neurologist looked shocked and I saw my wonderful surgeon afterwards who said surgery was the only option and "How about tomorrow?"  I could have kissed him.

The only issue with that was that this was happening the following day:

 

I reasoned that I could still go since it was a day procedure and a doddle compared to my very involved orthopaedic surgeries of years gone by.

Essendon was actually reasonably close and Not Pink Crafty Hubster was more than prepared to take me! 

Arriving there I discovered it was a (free) class and while I didnt pre-book, there were spare spots and spare kits.  I couldn't believe what was in the kit!  And free too!

I asked NPCH to be my hands and he said "Can't you do it left handed?"  I thought for minute and figured I could.  The first steps were merely stamping and watercolouring which work well messy anyway.

Here's what I started (since the class was almost finished) but you have to imagine it without all the extra uncoloured cameras stamped onto it.  I added those later at home.   Many of them will be covered up anyway.

I apologise for the terrible photo.  Apparently I cant do this either!

Of course no trip to Spotlight is complete without shopping.  NPCH was lovely about it.  (And we got to keep the stamp sets and ink pads we used in class!)

I took a couple of Project Life cards from several Dear Lizzy collections with me.  I picked ones with an image, but enough room for Lizzy to sign.

She was so lovely and chatty and friendly to everybody.  Really down-to-earth and generous with her time.

So I'm about 10 days post-op now.  I've improved since before surgery but unfortunately I still have pretty bad deficits in the most-used fingers of my dominant hand.  A problem when you want to craft.  You should see the amount of typos on this draft since I cant fully feel the computer keys.

Shimelle is starting a new class (probably within the next 12 hours) which I'm eager to do but how much I'll be able is another question.

I also haven't finished the layout I started with DL last week.  It will probably be several.  I already had her "Happy Place" paper pad at home which has the A-sides to her collection so I have plenty to work with combined with the kit and extra things I bought.  I just can't find my pack of word stickers!  It arrived a few days before my surgery and I was not in the best frame of mind so it could be anywhere. :-/

So please stay tuned - i'll do my best to get scrappy again!  I have a mountain of Glitter Girl and Shimelle challenges to catch up on and NSD is coming up!!!!