I'm finally FINALLY (at long last) bringing you Part 2 of the
Embellish With Flair sketch challenge which Heather and I did together...during October! 🙈
I
know it's also December. LATE December. Soz, lovelies! I actually
had finished it over a month ago, but since I did a process video (and
one with soooo much more raw footage than anticipated) editing has
happened sporadically between other things.
It was
actually rather involved and as usual I made it far more work than it
needed to be! But that's what I do. Every.Single.Time! 🤦
Heather
really put me to the challenge with this sketch. Definitely not my
usual sort of style, but they don't call it a challenge for nothing,
right?
I have no idea how I decided to use this sketch
with this photo of my adorable niece on her very first Book Week. I'm
pretty sure there was a suitably convoluted train of thought with led to
this decision, but overall I think it worked. 🤷
I used my October Counterfeit Kit (I know🤦) for this layout (well mostly. I did use a ton of scraps...)
I do
recommend you watch the process video (below) since I do go into that a
little bit as well as walking you though how I made it. I'm warning you...it's a bit of an ordeal! I distinguish myself by making a fairly simple task faaaar more complicated than it needs to be!
The rough gesso on the background and anything needing to stick on the seam lines of the "circles" needs more than your average adhesive which gives you three options:
1. Wet Glue. Liquid Glue. Whatever you want to call it. You need something fairly robust and I hatehatehate any that dry tacky. Why? Because my hand-eye co-ordination is lacking at the best of times, Occasionally it must be resorted to, but normally:
2. Hot glue. Even more messy. Sometimes necessary, but waiting for ancient fossilized lump (which was once a stick) inside glue gun to melt then having to interrupt crafting in order to treat 3rd degree burns is something I'd prefer to avoid if I possibly can.
3. Glue Dots. Fast, clean, easy and they come in all the strengths and sizes. This is my personal preference. They've been part of my life "these 20 years at least". (My fellow Janeites will get the reference!!)
Yes I do actually speak that way and my fambam know when to insert which quote!
Here are the still pics I promised you:
Title (with lots of messy threads! 😍)
"Tone on tone" embellishments and stitching detail
Fussy cut books embellished with tiny Wonder Woman stickers
Large book cut on the Silhouette
That name card that caused ever so much grief (and I still cant stick in s straight line despite multiple attempts! 🙈)
Lilya's First Book Week
Thanks for sticking with me and hope the vid wasn't too frustrating!
Today I'm sharing with you my project that I made for the monthly Quilter's Vibe YouTube collaboration started by Sara Scraps.
It's traditionally the last Thursday of the month, except this month it
was bumped a week because I wasn't the only one swamped! 😅
How
it works is that the four(?) ladies who take part take turns picking
out a quilt or quilt block, but something quilty which we can interpret
in any way into a layout (and of course YouTube process video).
This is the inspiration for November on the right. I'm afraid I don't know whose photo (or quilt) this is, otherwise I would credit the appropriate makers. If you let me know in the comments, I'll edit the post with your deets! I was just given the image. Sorry!
Here's my process video if you prefer to head right over to that:
If
you watch my video, you'll see how I managed to wreak havoc on a
lovely, calm, understated inspiration piece and inject all kinds of
crazy into it! 🤣🤣🤣
In addition, I was super pleased to use some of my every increasing collection of "frames". I got FOUR onto this page! *cue Happy Dance*. You can also see some of the stitching detail above.
I finished by stitching down aaaallll those buttons using two strands of embroidery floss and a slightly larger needle. A typical skein of floss is six stranded. The chipboard button have large holes and this way I could get each one stitched down much faster!
I
busted out some very precious and super "rare" paper from the vault
(who remembers "Love, Elsie" by KI Memories??), managed to measure and
cut wrong, change my mind several times and show a somewhat disturbing
inability to count to nine. 🙈
In my defense, there was a
tradie cutting floor tiles next door and not only can you hear his saw
on the video, it never fails to give me a headache. But it's life,
right? 🤷
I have to say I don't often do grid-type
layouts, but I have enjoyed them whenever a challenge has some my way.
Speaking of challenges, I still owe you (and Heather) Part ii of the
October sketch challenge over at EWF! It's finished, but I need to edit the vid
etc, so it should follow this one in a few days.
I have another Design Team project for EWF for you!
We're doing something a bit different this month and having a bit of a
challenge during the month of October. Heather and I have been
holding down the fort of late, so we decided to throw each other a
challenge to spice things up. Crece wanted a sketch challenge this
month anyway so #winning!
Heather and I each picked a sketch which each of us would make a project with.
The one Heather and I used this week was my pick. It's by Clique Kits
and a little different for me.
It's one I wanted
to use at some point anyway, but I thought the sketch itself really lent itself to using flair badges.
You can interpret this sketch quite literally and use circles as in the original, or replace them with any simple shape like hearts, triangles, stars etc. The main reason I opted for circles is that the round shape emphasizes the shape of flair badges and tries to keep them as a main feature. I'm not sure whether I succeeded in this respect given my style (which can only be described as "messy with a touch of psycho"! ).
If you check our Heather's interpretation, it's much more elegant. Her post is immediately before this one.
Unfortunately I don't have a process video this week, but I'll see what I can do next time when Heather and I tackle her choice of sketch.
I decided to "lightly" stencil some gold stars first before layering the circles on top. Since I decided to use punches, I was limited to the sizes I had. Throwing in two sizes of pinked circles added interest and seemed like a happy medium between circles and stars. My largest punch was smaller than the one in the sketch so while the placement is generally the same, it's not identical and there are more clusters of circles in my layout.
I used mostly scraps from my scrap box which I was SO pleased about! Mostly Shimelle's Glitter Girl and Starshine along with Amy Tangerine (mostly Hustle and Heart I think). I do spy an odd paper from Go Now Go, Little By Little now that I look at it,,,and a few from Dear Lizzy and some random ones. The woodgrain is from a tiny scrap of a most beloved Crate Paper collection - Notes and Things. remember that one? *siiigh*
Next step was messy ink splatter. I started with gold and while it looks lovely on darker colours, it wasn't giving the emphasis I wanted. I added some navy after it dried and it helped a little bit.
Then I mixed some gold paints and painted some DIY star Thickers for some texture and dimension.
I matted the photo block with lots of layers, which I was pleased to see in the sketch since I'd be doing it anyway!
The small shelf above the smaller photo was great for nesting the first part of the title...except I just couldn't find the right size and colour of alphas. I'm glad I included the woodgrain among all he primary colour as a bit of a neutral (which is why I used kraft alphas here). It also is a sort of a nod to the chair slats in the bokeh part of the larger photo.
I used a punch on some square stickers and trimmed down others. Initially I thought the clear gold stickers would look better on white cardstock, but I changed my mind. Using the stickers as they are just gives a subtle detail here and there.
There was this pack of puffy hearts I rediscovered in my stash a little while ago and I made good use of them and added navy enamel dots just because I could! Overall I think I used less embellishment than I usually do, but I don't think I could have added more considering all the crazy colour and pattern going on.
As far as the flair itself went, I could have (and almost nearly DID) use a lot more, BUT I need to keep some for next week's project since it might just be Wonder Woman related again! My personal challenge was to mix together some oddball flairs which might have been the last in the pack. I think the three work quite well together on this layout despite being more than a bit random!
All I can say is thank goodness for my beloved Glue Dots - Permanent, Mini and Micro. Without them I would have been forced to use wet glue for the flair and the chipboard elements (stars and blue Thickers) because we all know how well they stick! 😒
I journaled on the layout itself as I often do, but textured cardstock doesn't make it easy!My messy writing makes it look even worse, but what can I do? Mess with a date stamp I hoped would make it look a bit less odd, but not totally sure about that!
Would you believe me that I had actually finished the filming and the layout a couple of weeks ago? I think we're all getting the hang of having a semi-permanent recording set-up, but we're always making improvements along the way.
This layout brings together all-the-things! What do I mean by that? Sorta kinda killing two (or in this case more) proverbial birds with one stone.
Firstly, I used supplies from my September "Counterfeit Kit" to make this layout. You can read more about that here. Need a refresher of the inspiration kit for September's Counterfeit Kit Challenge (CKC)? Just click on over HERE to visit them!
Here's the process video below.
The other thing I manged to incorporate into the layout was the use of a sketch. Remember, September's Product Focus in the Rediscover Your Stash Facebook group is sketches?
The sketch came from Shimelle's free 4x6 Photo Love class from Two Peas days. I stumbled across the sketch on Pinterest and upon recognizing it as one of the lessons, I had a look on her blog and there it was! Shimelle didn't post the sketch, but she shared photos of the two layouts she made and posted them on them on her blog. Here is Shimelle's blog post and it contains a video of this lesson.
The reason I chose this sketch that CHALLENGE 1 in this month's CKC is "'Curate' Your Project". This turned out to be quite the drama. i spend days hunting for the photos but they remain elusive. I reeeaaaallly wanted to use some museum photos (I knoooow...kinda obvious interpretation) but with Shimelle's "Field Trip" being a museum inspired collection and us having lots of museum photos over the years, it seemed like a good fit. Especially the number and orientation of photos of one particular trip and this particular sketch
Butterflies were Plan B (more about in the video)! I guess the zoo is a kind of museum? And I always imagine "curators" as pinning down insects and butterflies (see where I'm going with this?) onto those numbered plates. It ended up for the best, because who makes butterfly flair better than Embellish With Flair? I was spoiled for choice and I don't even have all of them! 😮
I tell you, sitting down to a layout frequently takes you down a rabbit hole and it tells you what it needs. (What? don't your supplies talk to you??)
Hands up if you have plenty of "vintage" stash that you can't part with.
Yeah I thought so. I have a lot. Today I'm reporting that I successfully got them (OK OK THREE of them) on a layout after languishing in my stash for...I don't know...maybe 6-8 years? I have maybe 4 different packets of these rosettes. I know I manged to use up almost a full pack some years ago, so it IS possible. 🤔
Regardless of WHAT type of item it is that you're hoarding, the important reason is to ask yourself WHY. This will be different for everybody and may include a combination of factors.
Is it the fact that you paid money for it and don't want to feel like you're throwing money away if you get rid if it? You don't have to throw them out. Ask around at local schools, preschools, childcare and community centres...and hospitals too. They often have arts and crafts type programs and are grateful for the donations. You can feel good knowing your stuff will be enjoyed by sick kids.
Not you? Still clutching your preciousssssesss? 🤣 (Don't worry, clearly I am too!) hoarding it for a sentimental reason? Are you waiting for the PERFECT project. Larger, pre-made embellishments tend to be expensive so I can understand that.
If that's you, then I encourage you to read this article by Shimelle on what COULD happen to "special" supplies if you hold onto them too long. Gives you something to think about for sure.
What if you WANT to use them...TRY to use them, but they just look wrong every time.
That's me, BTW. 🙋🙋🙋 (Actually they're all me, but mostly the last one.)
The first tip I have at getting something to work is to go back to the same collection. Collections are designed to go together, They're made so you really just need to add photos, a pen and glue. I usually mix my collections so this is a step back and chance to refocus for me.
Chances are, if they're older supplies, you likely don't have much (if anything) left from the original collection. So go back to manufacturer if they are still in business. The rosettes I had were all brands under the American Crafts umbrella (I have two packs by American Crafts, one by Pebbles and one I can't remember now). Usually the colours have a certain familiarity about them.
You can also try and pull in motifs similar to those in the original collection, paying close attention to the colours.
For my part, in this particular case, I often felt they were too big...as are many supplies I LIKE, but just struggle to use (often due to size). In this particular instance, spreading them over a two-page layout seemed like a logical way to start. It was going to still take a bit of work since the photos took up a fair bit of space. What I DID like about using these rosettes is that they make a perfect nest for a flair badge! 🙌
They're so old the foam pads on the back just fell off! 🤣
Many are topped with a button and the button is almost always without thread. 😱 Naked buttons make me twitchy! Whatever adhesive was used to attach the button to the FRONT of the rosette was certainly more effective than the one used for the foam dots on the back! 😂 That rosette slightly popped open. Glue Dots fixed this, attached the flair and then the rosettes to the layout (don't even get me started on chipboard Thickers)...along with some of the other bits and pieces.
As you saw in the video, I chose the colours carefully to co-ordinate with both the flair and layout itself. The Pebbles ones had white circles with tiny "happy birthday" text that I never noticed before. Since I don't celebrate them and it's irrelevant to the story anyway, I pulled them off.
This is where you can start to bring the supplies into the modern era by replacing the various layers with punched circles of papers from your layout. Suddenly they don't stick out as much!
Since I was trying to draw attention to the flair badges, I chose not to replace the circles. The white flair against the blue/aqua looked really good. Flair, rather than buttons, gave them a fresh new look and I'm really pleased how they turned out. I can't say the same for all the other parts, but overall pretty satisfied given don't two page layouts
I think what I'm going to do is place all my "too hard" supplies in one basket nearby, so I'm looking at them and through them more often and don't miss opportunities to use them. An actual "too hard" basket! 🤣🤣🤣
Oh you probably want to see the rest of the layout, right? 😳😂
OK here is the title and journaling (yes I added the butterfly and black faceted gems after I stopped filming!):
And the whole spread:
The Butterfly House
Looks like the resident photographer had some "halp" and rather stringent quality control. It appeared to be the subject matter was all wrong, but as you can see below she fixed it! Phew! 🤣
I hope I've addressed most of the reasons why you might be holding on to supplies and how to get past this road block. Leave me a comment or email if you have any questions. I'll be happy to have a chat about it.
I'm here with my latest project for Embellish With Flair, and as usual my layout comes with a bit of a back story!
Paper
Issues (an online scrapbook retailer) has a Facebook Group with lots and lots of challenges each month. One of the challenges is a weekly
scraplift challenge when a layout by one of their Design Team is
selected and the mission is to scraplift it!
The one I chose to
scraplift was THIS ONE by MandaJane Ulmer. It was an August challenge
and I thought with the time difference between Australia and the USA I
might just scrape in.
Ummm...nope!
At
the same time, my good friend Sara Scraps' Facebook Group Rediscover Your Stash has a monthly product focus and this month it's not a
physical product, it's SKETCHES! I decided to extend this a little bit
to include scraplifting. I'm really hoping to get a lot of great stuff
done during September, so by doing that I can mix things up a bit and still bash the product focus!
As soon as I saw the sketch I thought of these photos. The main photo made me laugh - I mean who sniffs a shoe right out of the box? 🤷🤣 It also gave me a chance to use up as many of those Converse All Star embellishments that so many collections seem to include. It's an iconic shape and style which makes it easy, so even though his shoes are Nikes, the All Stars will have to do!
A boy layout is also another great way to use up some of my rather large collection of boy Flair and Words 4 was perfect! 👍👍👍 The black co-ordinates with everything else, the words are a perfect match, and the round, shininess helps them stand out at the same time. I deliberately steered clear of round black elements mostly for this reason.
I wanted to use both red and a burgundy sort of shade (which is tricky to find!) since those were the colours in the shoes. Grey and black were the most likely candidates for neutrals and I mixed whites and creams so the more shades the better in that regard.
This was another example of a layout which told ME what it wanted. I wanted to throw in a touch of aqua and maybe lime green and woodgrain, but I ended up pulling all those papers back up again and getting rid of them. Instead I was told I was allowed to have light blue. 🤷🤷🤷
MandaJane's layout has a lot of embellishment, but only a few papers. I wanted to add plenty of layers of the various reds rather than just a single one. It's much more my style and they would look odd if I just put one of each - as though I tried to match them but failed miserably!
I finally finished painstakingly putting together the embellishment clusters in more or less the same spots, but I didn't add the tabs like in the middle of the original layout.
There wasn't a whole lot of space left for ink droplets, but I wanted to bring out the silver in some of the alphas and embellishments. I picked silver and some greys-with-shimmer mists and went a bit berserk if I'm honest! 😳
Here are a few close up of them:
The "love this" sticker is silver but photographed gold for some reason! 😖
The main photo was part of the inspiration for my title along with the fact that this guy is 15 and appreciates more and more of his mothers favourite bands from the '90s! I do love titles with hidden meanings and my boys are pun crazy so they happen a lot!
The original layout didn't have any journaling and I needed some, so I kept the bottom left corner free and hoped it would fit. I tried to write small, used ampersands where possible and it fit! Phew!
I'm awfully sorry I'm late with my Embellish With Flair project, but I have a good reason I promise!
I have been meaning to revive my poor YouTube channel...all year. 😳😳😳
It has been languishing with just a few videos for the longest time and I've spent the last 10 days or so making videos for various assignments and battling technology dragons. 🐉
I am aiming to make videos a regular part of my creative process spread over my various Design Team and personal projects. The quality of the set up and editing is not what I'd like, so it's a work in progress and only to get better.
So what did I make? Well, as usual there is a story behind it (isn't there always?) and it starts with the Counterfeit Kit Challenge.
Aaaanyway, my kits are always huge and it frustrates me. If I like the kit I have no problem keeping it together and working from it even after the month is over. It will be the case with this one since I started late in the month (I wasn't even intending to play along) and this layout I'm bringing you today is just the first one.
If you'd like to see my kit and read my thoughts on that (along with ANOTHER video 😮) here is the relevant post.
Today's project has a lot less paper than I'd normally use, and a lot more "stuff". It often happens that my layouts take me along for the ride and they just do their own thing. While it definitely didn't turn out EXACTLY as I imagined, I'm actually really happy with it and pleased to use the flair in a different way. I mixed up the various collections since I was working with colour and at the same time, motifs were critically important.
It was all about rainbows inspired by those gorgeous Oobi dresses my nieces are wearing. The background paper from Shimelle's Glitter Girl line reminded me so much if them, and I wanted to scrapbook the Instax photo too. I'm trying to mix the sizes up a little bit.
All the pieces in that huge rainbow mean something to me as they relate to my lovely nieces and I think there are EIGHT flair badges? That's gotta be some kind of a record for one scrapbook page, no? 🤣.
Here are some close ups of the embellishment rainbow:
Can you spot the letters L and T and the numbers 2 and 4? I love those little cut aparts in Shimelle's collections to add little personal details like the girls' initials and ages at the time of the photo.
Can you see the globe hiding in there? Those girls are
some of the most well traveled global citizens I even met with frequent overseas
jaunts.
Also, as I can attest, sisters are very much friends for a lifetime. I mean you can say just about anything to them and still can't get rid of them! 🤣 I'm kidding, Both mine are so different, yet equally awesome. xx
That's right, there are not one, but TWO birds in the picture below. Ew. 🤢 If you don't already know, I have a phobia to the icky things. Those two just happen to be from Shimelle's Sparkle City collection. She says I'm the only person with permission to dislike her birds, but to be fair, she makes them look rather less menacing than the stuff of my nightmares.
So why are they there, I hear you ask? Good question! 🤣 My oldest niece teases me mercilessly about the subject, and there's no-one I'd rather take it from for sure! 😍
I was also happy to add some things that I often pull out and end up putting back like those fabric tabs by Basic Grey. I stitched them down at one end letting them still flap about. You know by know I love colour and texture and using all-the-things. Infact, this layout could just about be called all-
the-flair!
The journaling on the surface was about the dresses, but on a deeper level it went into how those dresses (and many other like them) are a reflection of how I feel about those girlies who are just pure sunshine and rainbows. Everyone who meets them is enamored with them. You can't come away
grumpy after seeing them!
You are a Beautiful Rainbow of Possibilities Scrapbook Layout
I'm finally FINALLY (at long last) bringing you Part 2 of the
Embellish With Flair sketch challenge which Heather and I did together...during October! 🙈
Heather
really put me to the challenge with this sketch. Definitely not my
usual sort of style, but they don't call it a challenge for nothing,
right?
