Kitchen Pool

Not much scrap happening here I'm afraid - partly because I've been playing pool with No.1 Son!

Our visit to Newcastle-Upon-Tyne was favoured with warm-ish, sunny weather and we were taken to see the "Shoe Trees" in a nearby park.

Apparently the tradition of throwing shoes up into the branches started in 1627 when the Heaton Sheriff wanted to celebrate the birth of his grandson. Nowadays, so many people throw celebratory shoes that there has to be an annual "harvest".

We also managed to see the centre of Newcastle at night; the Millenium Bridge was spectacular:

 I'm back home again now and hopefully there will be some scrapping to share soon :-)

Masked Mayhem

Now Challenge #1 this month over at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog was a real challenge for me: I don't like messy scrapping!  The lack of control with splattering paint or ink around leaves me uncomfortable, but a challenge is meant to be challenging so I got stuck in anyway!  I dug out some masks and a friend's spray inks and got busy ... and then threw away all of those experiments as they really didn't work with the photos I wanted to scrap with!  Instead, out came some star punches, some scrap card and one of the offcuts from my May Counterfeit Kit.

The bright white contrast was removed from my black & white paper with shots of blue and red mists.  I then laid the stars, punched from the scrap card, out along the top and bottom of my base cardstock and sprayed over them with a blue shimmer spray.  The idea had been to leave star shapes visible, but the effect was very subtle.  After leaving the paper to dry flat under some weights (another reason I'm not happy with messy scrapping is that I'm slow enough without drying/flattening time) I decided something else was needed!

So I laid out some of my title alphas (American Crafts Dear Lizzy glitter thickers) and sprayed lightly over them before repeating the process around the base cardstock. Much happier with that effect - still subtle, but in a good way.  The punched stars didn't go to waste though - I added them on top!

This challenge will be used for the CKCB Members' Blog Hop later in the month - why not sign up here and have a go!

Counterfeiter's Crime Scene

Welcome to the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog's NSD Scene Of The Crime hop around the Master Forgers' crafty spaces.  It started here with Sherrie and you should have reached me from Angela.

So here it is: my "official" scrapping space - one end of our family room in all its glory.  I have a desk, a chair and some storage space along with a daylight lamp for evening crafting.  I wonder just how many scrappers use IKEA Expedit furniture?!?!?

I say "official" because I often spread to the dining table as there's more space and I'm nearer to Hubby and we can chat while I scrap.  The rolling tool box in the foreground is my crop box and a lot of my supplies live in there permanently so that I can grab and go!  As you can see I did NOT tidy up before taking the photo ... too busy scrapping this page! 

Now it's time to take a look at Jennifer's place.  Hopefully a little more organised than me (especially as she hosted an Organisation Weekend not so long ago)!

Counterfeiting May Seriously Damage Your Pile Of Scraps!

Welcome to another month of kit counterfeiting with the Counterfeit kit Challenge Blog.  This month we are welcoming Sherrie as our guest designer to start off the counterfeiting and if you hopped here via Angela you will already know that the luscious kit-to-copy this month is Polly! Scraps March Kit Shoreline.  Lots of primary colours mixed with white, some funky buttons, envelopes and trims ...

Now, I haven't been making a huge dent in my kits recently as scrapping time has been diverted elsewhere, so this month I decide to base a lightweight kit around papers from my scraps bags alone.

Hmmm! Not one single complete sheet of patterned paper; just scraps of various sizes!  Which makes it quite hard to type up a list of contents as most of the manufacturer's strips are long gone :-)

Yellows: MME Be Amazing, EP Adventurer, LBD Lemonade, Bazzill Swiss Dot Cardstock, EP Sunshine
Reds: Daisy D's red dot, Kaisercraft Silly Season, EP Rambunctious, Sandylion My Heart Beats For You
Blues: Portobello Road Polka Dot Blue, Kaisercraft Loire Valley
Blacks: Sandylion U Gimme Butterflies, DCWV Black & White Prints

Various trims from my stash
Sandylion Red & Yellow Disney Alphas
Mrs Grossman's Vellum Edge stickers
Various journalling spots including Jenni Bowlin shaped journalling spots
Hand-coloured home-made buttons (check the CKCB on May 8th for lots of counterfeiting tutorials).
Cardstock will be added from my stash as required.  It will be interesting to see how far I can stretch the kit and whether the fact that the papers are already cut up will help or hinder creativity.

Now please hop over to Jennifer to see what she's put together from Polly! Scraps inspiration kit.

P.S. There's a call out for new Master Forgers over at the CKCB - if you love counterfeiting why not apply?! The deadline is May 30th!

Passing The Page With JSquared #2

My lovely friend Julie (aka JSquared) is celebrating her 2nd Blogiversary today and is marking it with a Pass the Page. She collected a baker's dozen of us together to each scraplift a page in turn. The person before me in the chain was my very good friend Ruth (if she sent you here then you're on track, if not, you might like to start at the beginning with Julie here). Ruth is currently scrapping photos from her visit to the Harry Potter Studios so it seemed extra appropriate for me to use her page as inspiration for a photo of another magical place (as well a gears & cogs cut from her dies at our Bloggers' Retreat).

Journalling on the "this is life" tag tells the story of how our early morning plans to ride the Tower of Terror resulted in Child No.3 feeling violently "unwell" at MGM Studios.  Luckily, Disney have a great health centre and she was able to recover there for a couple of hours in a darkened room with me while the men-folk carried on enjoying the rides.  By mid-day she had recovered and was adamant that the Ice Cream Social at Epcot was next on the agenda!! The back of the tag has photo-proof that a couple of hours sick bay sleep worked their magic and Child No.3 was back to "normal"!

Can you see the resemblance to Ruths's page? I kept the large single photo, corner embellishments and the horizontal strip.  I replaced the subtle checked paper with vellum and switched the journalling for my title.  All supplies are from my March Counterfeit Kit.

I wonder what elements were kept or discarded when Kirsty scraplifted my page? Before you pop over to see, you should know that there is a prize available on this Pass the Page hop, all you have to do is comment (here, there and everywhere)!

A Super-Quick Page

Welcome to the penultimate leg of the April Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog Members' Blog Hop (or CKCBMBH for short)!  Today we are sharing our takes on the photo inspiration challenge.  I had a go at this earlier in the month ... but it wasn't hard to do another page with my April Counterfeit Kit as the colours of the kit match the inspiration photo pretty well!

I made 95% of this page at my last crop ... in about 30 minutes!  Because I had taken about 5 hours to make a single page (too much chatting and faffing around), my neighbour challenged me to get another page done in the remaining time!  A quick bit of machine sewing once I was home and it was done!

That is seriously fast for me.  But then I find the (space for the) title is often a stumbling block, and I haven't bothered to use one with this page, so perhaps that's the secret to speed scrapping?!

Most of my pages have titles of some sort. Do you think layouts have to have a title?

The final stop on the hop is Glinda, but if you didn't reach me while hopping around the CKCBMBH from Jennifer you might like to nip over to the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog and see what everyone else has done for this challenge. 

Lean Mean MAXI-Books - The Instructions (The Cover)

Welcome back!
Yesterday I shared the instructions for making the inner pages of my Lean Mean MAXI-Book - which was quite enough photos and text for one day!  I'm rested, you're rested and so today I have the instructions for the cover.

The Cover

Cut two x12 strips of cardstock.  Punch a decorative border along one short edge of each rectangle and trim the strips so that they measure 5¼"x9¾" and 5¼"x6" respectively.  Keep these trimmings for finishing the inside of the cover (see below).
Score three times across the width of the longer strip (¾", 6¼" and 7") and once across the width of the shorter strip (¾").  Crease all score lines as shown in the photo. 

Apply adhesive to the inner side of the ¾" flap on shorter piece (the front cover) and join it to the outer side of the ¾" flap on larger piece (the back cover and closing flap) to form a 5¼"x14½" cover.

Make two slits for the ribbon closure about 2" up from the bottom edge on either side of the central section.  Slot your ribbon pieces into place and secure with tape.  You need 9-12" for the left-hand piece and 6-9" for the right-hand piece (if you have 20-26" you don't have to cut it in two).  The shorter measurements are enough to tie a knot, the longer ones are enough for a bow.

Apply adhesive to the back of the inner pages and secure in place on the left of the central section of the cover, leaving room for tag-pulls on the right hand side.  (Be careful to ensure the pages are the correct way up before you stick them down)

In order to stop the ribbon tie from squashing the inner pages I added a cardstock "stop" inside the front cover.  It's two thin strips from the 5¼" offcuts, layered on top of each other 2¾" in from the punched edge of the front flap (see photo above).



Cover with a 3"x5¼" rectangle of cardstock to form a slot (as shown above).  When closing the cover, slip the right-hand flap inside the slot and the cover will remain in shape once the ribbon is tied.

Add 4"x4" cardstock photo mats, photos, tag-ties, embellishments and journalling and you're done!  I'm still working on mine, so here's a view inside one I completed earlier!

Thanks for sticking with me ... do please let me know if you have a go at my Lean Mean MAXI-Book (or even my original Lean Mean Mini-Book) as I'd love to see your version!