Calendar Catch-up #2

I promised myself that I would get a move on with transferring my Month In Numbers posts (read all about MiN here) onto paper while I was away at The Second Green Buttons' Retreat (the Remix) earlier this month.  Armed with print-outs from my blog and some extra notes from the calendar and my diary, I am proud to report that I completed seven missing months' journalling!!!  The pages themselves were ready, it was just a question of adding the words and numbers.  I won't bore you with them all, but I do have a previously unseen pair of pages made with my September Counterfeit Kit, featuring the stitched lettering that I have been using recently along with some counterfeit tags and fake felt flowers too.

My contribution to the retreat was sharing some hand-stitching ideas including a template for the stitched letters.  I have sized the letters to match my diminishing supply of Scenic Route chipboard alphas.  Printed out onto a transparency, they can be positioned exactly where you want them to be before you prick through to create your stitching holes.  And because the transparency is reasonably durable you can use it again and again.

Do you fancy having a go with my template?  I've uploaded it to share here (for some reason it looks like a blank sheet on Google Drive's preview, but it does download properly). Do please leave me a comment and let me know what you make of it.

Calendar Catch-Up

Do you blog your days?
Do you scrap your months?
I'm not great with committing to year-long projects, but I had a whale of a time with Scrapbook & Cards Today's Project 12 in 2010, producing a whole album of double page layouts (some of which I've blogged about) documenting the family activities with photos and words.

2011 however, was an utter failure and I gave up half-way through March ending up with a double-page summary for the whole year instead.

This year I've been playing along with Julie's Month In Numbers and using the blog posts to get my months onto paper.  I'm still behind (I've only just published June's MiN post, and not all the numbers have made it onto paper) so I took advantage of the third challenge from the CKCB to take inspiration from a summer garden and get July's numbers scrapped and August's page ready to go.

I combined this with the weekly challenge on UKScrappers which called for
stitching, tearing, recent journalling and non-flat ribbon!

My August Counterfeit Kit was perfect for a summer garden theme with lots of warm, sunny colours, some honeycomb and stem patterns and I adapted the die-cut rosettes to look like the sun (at least I think it does) and flowers by snipping the straight edges at an angle.

These pages cheer me up - they are so sunny - unlike our current weather - torrential rain, strong winds and no sign of the sun at all!
Hopefully your garden inspired crafting will also bring you joy - link up here and I'll come and look

March's Numbers On Paper

I'm not quite sure where the month of April has gone, but I suddenly realised that the end was nigh and I still hadn't blogged my March Month In Numbers!!!  Not wanting a repeat of last year's Project 12 (which also stalled during March) I have set to work to remedy the situation, putting these numbers straight down on paper - using scraps from my April Counterfeit Kit - and also prepared the opposite page ready for April's numbers too.

The titles were cut with Man, Oh, Man! Sizzlit dies 
from the film-strip frame waste from my Bellagio Fountains page

5 = blue toes for Mum who fell awkwardly after helping with the Talking Newspaper recording.  Luckily nothing is broken, just badly bent. {She's still limping but on the mend after six or seven weeks}

3,  2 and 1 are for the physio appointments, consultant appointments and steroid injection I had for my various ailments ... getting old is no fun at all!

1 = an unexpected overnight guest, delayed on her way home to the Isle of Man when the ferry company texted her to say that the ferry had broken down ... and was returning to Douglas without any passengers!  Luckily she was able to reverse her journey slightly and stay with us.  We put the world to rights over a couple of glasses bottles of wine!

2 = free tickets for the Moscow State Circus at the theatre where I work occasionally. It was a brilliant show on our tiny stage with laughter at the various clowns, wincing at the contortionist's impossible angles and wonder at the strength, grace and skill of the various acrobatic acts. 

24/7 = Hubby's cover at work ... much too restricting even though he wasn't called out!

7 = nights I spent in Vegas with 5 friends.  I dared to do my 1st helicopter flight and notched up my 100th geocache while I was there too.

4 = days spent in Krakow by Child No.3 who "enjoyed" her visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau and now wants to get married in the Salt Mines!

There wasn't quite room on my page for some of my other numbered notes so I'll add them here:

4 = books taken to Las Vegas, where, apart from the travel guides, I didn't read a thing!  Once I was back in the UK, I did manage to read 1 story about harvesting people for organs to order - yuk - "The Fifth Vial" by Michael Palmer.
45 = minutes spent on the phone to No.2 Son trying to determine what he thinks he's doing at university!
200 = blog posts celebrated with a Tagxedo tutorial.

I used a border punch to add interest
to some more counterfeit washi tape

If you pop over to Notes on Paper I'm sure you will find that other people joining in with Julie's "My Month In Numbers" will be a lot less tardy than me ... they've probably done April's already (I know Julie has)!

Hello Doily

The latest challenge over at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog is to use doilies ... not my favourite scrapping resource, but having dipped out of the first challenge this month, I felt obliged to have a go.  Actually it was easier than I thought after spotting this page by Kirsty where she'd made a real statement with her doily by painting it black!  (The page I made with a black doily is here)
For today's page I used Child No.3's Promarkers to add colour to a small doily, picking out the blue in the striped border I used to make chevrons for my page.

I blogged my first Month in Numbers at the end of January and here it is, down on (Scenic Route's double-sided Sonoma patterned) paper:

My doily had 12 sections to it, so after colouring,  I removed 6 of them to see if there was a snowflake vibe to it ... that would be a "No!" ... so I cut it into two sections and layered them to make a dimensional semi-circle.  The chevrons are cut from a striped border from Cosmo Cricket's The Boyfriend Collection.  My numbers were cut with Sizzlit Ducky Wucky dies from my Kraftcore cardstock, sanded and inked to help the numbers stand out.  I added some buttons and a title made from all sorts of random chipboard alphabets pulled from my stash, coloured with black ink to match each other.

In an effort to be ready for February's numbers (and create a facing page for my album), I have half-prepared a page with the same supplies and another border strip from my February Kit along with another Promarker coloured doily - a heart of course!

I'm doubt I will continue with this page design (and doily use LOL) for the rest of the year as I'll get bored, but I'll definitely use matching designs and base colours for each pair of pages - that will work well and save effort!