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.