Design Decisions Class Prompt 1

Design Designs is Shimelle's newest class which ran throughout November and as the name suggests is all about breaking down and analysing the decisions we make on layouts.

As someone who has taught classes, it may seem strange to others that I actually take them myself, but it's something many crafters do since we all have something to offer and I love seeing experienced crafters willing to learn from their peers.  Nobody ever truly stops learning. 🎓

Attack of the Man Dollies

I often (OK pretty much always) do a "post mortem" on my layouts and cards when I'm done.  I'm probably overly critical, but this isn't a bad thing.  It helps me to continue to identify what I like and dislike and what I should or should not repeat on future projects.

For me, a lot of the classes I take aren't necessarily to learn new techniques (though some are), but if I find a fellow crafter whose style matches mine, taking her classes gives me material to use when Arthur* doesn't allow me to do it all.  Something needs to give and I need to remove some part pf the process.  It's the difference between having a layout done or not.  In such cases,  using a sketch - either an actual sketch or using a layout as a sketch helps me most.  For others, removing another part of the process might be more useful.  This is possibly something to revisit in the future.

For this first layout, I was so inspired by Shimelle's use of October Afternoon papers - especially a multi coloured stripe which OA does ever so well.  I loved the slight retro vibe the papers give to the project and I immediately thought of these pictures.

I chose a different stripe with colours that better reflected my memory of the photos and the colours in the pictures themselves.  I also wanted to use a fair bit of woodgrain since that (for me) often evoke a vintage feel.

I tried to stay towards "boy" colours and motifs since the story is very much a boy story and my boys (yes even the Man Child is included in this) are very BOYboys.  As a general rule, I don't have a problem using pinks or florals on boy pages, though.

 So in addition to the three design questions that Shimelle presents us with each prompt, I usually have a lot more of my own.  It started with the supplies for this layout.


Next part of the analysis is always the "post mortem".  I wish the red piece of paper was smaller,  but it was slightly complicated by the fact that the photos were not the same size as the ones in the sketch.


Overall I'm pretty happy - wish I had a third star with the woodgrain pattern but this was out of my control.




The embellishment areas are a bit different to what I usually do. and I don't normally use so much orange so that was nice for a change!

I was feeling a bit brave, but really I wanted to capture those retro feels.  I admit I used some filters on the photos since the boys were all excited about their "rare" find.



Remember that scene in The Big Bang Theory when they find those dolls and...More than one person has referred to NPCH* as Sheldon.  Anyway...


I'm also using this class as my challenge in Mercy Tiara's challenge for December which is to finish something!  I'll have to make sure one of my layouts fulfils the Tic Tac Toe mini challenge

Feline Hydration Appliance

This layout shows that it's possible to use a travel themed collection (Shimelle's  Go Now Go in a layout which has nothing to do with travel (unless you count the 5 minute car ride to buy the thing).  😉

Plenty of the papers and embellies in that collection have lovely neutral patterns (as in non-themed - lots of bright colours!).  Even the bits that are travel themed are so versatile that they can be used to document short trips or used more metaphorically in terms of taking journeys in life etc.  I really love using themes in unexpected ways.







I wanted my product choices to reflect the look of the fountain (The drinking fountain looks like a white daisy with a green stem and yellow centre). It isn't easily apparent in the photo.

I found a packet of green Sassafras blossoms quite by accident which look a bit big for the embellishment areas, but I really wanted to use them.  The navy floral is a way of doing that without being really matchy matchy.  

Several pages later in the album, there is another layout about this and it shows the rest of the story.  I plan to use similar (though not the same) colours and motifs on that page.  I have a page kit ready, but page not made.  

I think in both layouts, my urge to "Use ALL the things" kicks in strongly after a hiatus of any decent length.  It's something I recognise and try to control and it settles after a few layouts of more regular crafting.  

I even made a third layout (It was for Prompt 14, though) in the small hours of the morning and definitely less than pleased with the outcome, but more on that in due course.  The main thing is I have identified what bothers me, but not to the point I want to pull the layout apart (been there done that! 😱).  


Anyway enough of that - I need to get through the whole course before 27 December if I'm to succeed in my challenge!

*Please refer to left sidebar for acronyms! 😊

Mercy Tiara Tic Tac Toe challenge for November

Not feeling quite content with submitting one entry for Mercy Tiara/Tracy Banks' 27 Day Challenge, I decided to have a go at the Tic Tac Toe challenge which is an additional bit of fun each month along with the main challenge.

The blog post about my first challenge entry and what it involved an be found here:

This is what November's Tic Tac Toe looked like:

I knew it would be easy to put something together with those prompts.  The idea is to pick three consecutive ideas (vertically, horizontally or diagonally) as though you were playing noughts and crosses!

I decided to use the rightmost column, but as it happened I included 2 other prompts without realizing initially!

Just Hanging With My Girl

 

I recently acquired most of the Cute Girl line by Crate Paper and you'd be forgiven for asking why someone with no daughters would need this line?  Well firstly, the colours and motifs are so very me...and I have no issue using pinks or florals on boy photos sometimes (as you can tell from my previous entry to the November Challenge).  I do have a couple of nieces and and my feisty (don't worry I've fixed the spelling on my layout) girl cat...And did I mention the collection features loads of cat motifs?  Pink and cats?  Be still, my heart!

Most of the supplies are from this line, but I think I also used a little bit of Shimelle's Starshine, Crate Paper's Hello Love and some embellishments from Maggie Holmes' Bloom Line and Cocoa Vanilla's Sugar and Spice (another little girl line)

So my three challenges according to the chart were:

Use a floral embellishment - check.  I used one die cut from the die cut pack, 2 large puffy stickers from Maggie Holmes' Bloom and at least one flower sticker from the Cute Girl.

 

Use two different alphas - check.  Actually I used three.  The large silver Thickers were Shimelle's Fitzgerald and the white glittery ones a much older line.  The small tile stickers were from those two-packs of flat alphas that October Afternoon was doing with their Daily Flash collections.  Both die cut pack and cut apart sheet included a flash card with "G" which I knew I wanted to use as part of the title.

Do some stamping - check.  I started by stamping a floral stamp on the yellow polka dot paper layer (from Starshine) so just a little shows.  I used a doily border stamp in three areas, but in the end only one ended up being visible at the top of the layout

 

 I also used some stamps on the labels from the sticker sheet - the date and a couple of sentiments from the Paper Smooches stamp set Charmed Cat Two.  Miss Crafty Cat aka Ophelia was a shelter cat so the "happily homed" is just right.

 

 Before I even started, I wanted to bust out the texture paste (I opted for Faber Castell's Texture Luxe in the Pearl finish  Dried kinda silver, but that worked!). 

This turned out to be one of the other challenges in the Tic Tac Toe grid (along with puffy stickers.  I have puffy flowers, words and that funny heart in a circle thing)

It feels like an age since I've done a more mixed media-ish layout and it's a girly page with no whiff of boys, so I was going to go to town with the embellies and all things girly.  I know my embellishment clusters are pretty full on, but it's probably no co-incidence that the Dowager Countess from Downton Abbey is my most favourite character and she describes my style in a nutshell:

 So in the spirit of Lady Violet, I added acetate pieces from the die cut pack, cats either cut from the patterned paper or from the sticker sheet/die cut pack, word stickers, labels, enamel hearts and some very dimensional  crystals I've had in my stash for ages, a single Cocoa Vanilla badge (exercising self control and denial here) And mist.  Lots of crazy out of control mist droplets.

So there you have it - both parts of November's challenge done and dusted.  Now if I can continue harnessing this unexpected burst of mojo, that would be fab since there is so much to do between now and the end of the year.  Fun crafty stuff among the rest, but I still need energy and a shred of sanity to do fun stuff.

Thanks for checking out my layout and please don't forget to visit Mercy Tiara over on her Youtube channel if you haven't already.

Mercy Tiara 27 Day Challenge for November

Oooh look at me go!  I've finished a layout well before the deadline.  I must be ill!

Mercy Tiara (also known as Tracy Banks) is probably best known for her process videos on YouTube, but she also has a Facebook group for this particular challenge.  In a nutshell, on the first of the month, the challenge is given and it's due on 27th.  The winner then picks a challenge for next month.  Sounds fun!

Captain Underpants

Other challenges include a TicTacToe challenge each month.

Here is Tracy's Video announcing the challenge:

This month the challenge needed to include 4 components:

*Two Photos

*The colour purple (rare in scrapbooking as a rule)

*Texture/dimension

*About something funny or silly

The first reaction most people have to purple supplies is that there are very few of them and this is true compared to most other colours, but I found surprisingly many!

MME has some purple in the girl colourway of an old collection called Lime Twist and the Sherbet colourway of Jubilee
Basic Grey has featured various shades of purple fairly consistently over the years throughout their collections
Studio Tekturek in their Hey Kiddo collection
WeRMK in Hello Darling, Love 2 Craft and a plummy shade in Inked Rose
Sassafras includes some shade here and there
Dear Lizzy in Serendipity and a more plummy shade in Documentary
Stampin' Up! always has some DSP in a few shades of purple
I can also recall purple popping up in Echo Park, Bella Blvd, Bo Bunny and tiny amounts in various Amy Tangerine collections.  I'm sure there are others.

I think I pay more attention to purple because it's one of the colours that appears in my son's school album, so I always make sure I have some on hand.

As soon as I started looking through my Basic Grey cache, I knew I wanted to use the Soleil collection, which in addition to various shades of purple, features yellows, pinks and orange.  The whimsical, slightly retro feel would go very well with my photos.  On first glance it's hard to see why, but Small Crafty Dude is wearing his Adventure Time Onesie.  Lady Rainicorn features purple, the pink robe goes well with the Soleil Collection, not to mention plenty of "Jake Yellow".

I teamed it up with a couple of pieces of paper from the Nerdy Bird Collection by Sassafras which also has that retro vintage vibe that goes well with Adventure Time.

I didn't want to use too much purple since there is only a tiny amount in the photo and its not what the story is about.

I have no idea what was happening with my layers.  I just couldn't cut them to the right size, so what should have been 5-ish pieces of paper under the photos (which are mounted on vellum for extra texture) are actually about 20 having been chopped and stretched and placing the photos strategically to hide the joins!

As is always the case when I haven't crafted for a while (in this case the gap is shorter than usual), I'm not totally thrilled with my layout, because I want to put EVERYTHING on it!  I had grand plans for more word stickers and brads and chipboard shapes and brads and and and...

So that's purple taken care of.
Two photos? Check.
Silly?  Goes without saying.

Oddly, I used relatively few pop dots compared to most layouts, but texture (as in non paper) comes in many forms - regular and glitter washi, glitter thickers, enamel dots and stars, gems, stickers, a badge and one of those enamel paperclip thingies

Some ink drops to finish off and I think I'm done with this one.  I have lots I'd like to get though this month.  I still have a couple of card projects I wanted to do from last month, still going with #The20Project and now there is a new class...

...and hoping to offer classes myself locally.  Argh!

Oh wait...the Daily Marker Challenge is also running.  My success has never been great in the past and I suspect this month will be much the same!

Thanks for stopping by and please visit Mercy Tiara over on YouTube

I'm determined to look on each success no matter how small and a finished layout for my album is definitely a reason to celebrate.  Another story told.

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.