Octopus Garden

Did I mention that I like sketches?  When I saw Sketchy Thursday's offering this week I knew I had to use it - and so I have stayed up very late tonight to get this page finished before the deadline!  Naturally I changed a few things and of course I used some more stash from my home-made Counterfeit Kit (contents here).

I've inked and covered some extra bare chip alphas from my stash for the title, but the tiny alpha stickers are from my kit.  There are no apostrophes in the set so I went with "I like to be" rather than "I'd like to be" - I'm a proper punctuation kinda girl!

Photos courtesy of my fellow holidaymakers - thank you

 The "waves" are cut with a Sizzlit decorative border die and I used a template to place Liquid Pearls in a fancy shape across the page.  Don't tell, but part of the photo positioning was determined by a smudge of the thumb!

Well, I cut into the final sheet of paper from my Counterfeit Kit tonight - it is now officially a pizza box full of scraps!. I reckon there's one more page in it before the card-making begins!

Lucky for me!

I was running late, as usual, today when there was a knock on my door.  The postman.  With two pizza boxes!  My favourite kind of post :D  Lucky for me I hadn't already left.

One pizza box was expected: I'd just spent a £10 e-voucher at A Trip Down Memory Lane, my recent prize from their blog - but they get 10/10 for speedy delivery all the same.  Thank you Mel & Jill ♥

The other pizza box was slightly more of a surprise, in that I won a prize over at Sketchy Thursdays - a kit from Coodinate Collections, and was beginning to wonder where it had got to.

I was even more surprised to open up the box and find this - what a fabulous extra touch Jamie - I certainly will!

Doggy Dilemma

This time last year my Mum got herself a new puppy - a cute, blacker than black, Cockerpoo (or Spoodle if you prefer the Australian version).

She was nigh on impossible to photograph unless asleep and even then she was so black that my camera couldn't capture her soft curly fur.  As she's got older some brown has crept in amongst the black but she hasn't got any easier to capture on film because she is so bouncy, so fast and so keen to play.  I tried to get some first "anniversary" shots of her last week and not a single one is really worthy of the mantelpiece!  In the end I decided to make a page with the photos anyway - after all they still show that she is bouncy, fast and keen to play :D

I used this week's sketch (#2.03) from Sketchy Thursdays.  I'm not sure I will ever do a seed bead border again - it took forever despite having pre-made the holes with my sewing machine.  Good to use up some patterned paper scraps though.

In the mean time, all hints and tips for photographing mad, bouncy, black dogs gratefully received.

Hand-crafted

I love making things myself. I'd rather have the satisfaction of putting together a few ingredients and cooking up my own dish/embellishment/fancy dress outfit than pay someone else to do it for me. So you won't find (m)any ready meals or ready-made embellies in my house, nor did my purse suffer too badly when the children needed to wear togas, Victorian dress or appear as skeletons.

Having only a Sidekick and a couple of Sizzlit alphabets, I occasionally suffer from Cricut/Robo/Eclipse envy, but then I remember that I have stamps, a printer connected to my laptop and a good pair of scissors. So it seemed appropriate for my page about the craftsman on the beach of my hotel in Egypt to get back to basics and do my own title.

So I dug out my favourite Banana Frog Steelfish Outline stamps and some scraps of old Basic Grey paper. This font is easy to cut out as the definition of the letter with all the fiddly bits is inside the outline. For the word "Artisan" I'd backed the paper with card before cutting the letters out and mounting with foam stamps (I will be giving the stamps a good clean, I promise!)

My page is originally based on the Sketchy Thursday's sketch for January 20th.

I added Maya Road ribbon, some beadazzle-covered Woodware chipboard to fit in with the rest of this week's challenge over at UKS (thanks Dawn for a great challenge).

It's just occurred to me that I've also got this font on my laptop and therefore I'm not limited to this size and using my stamps ... I'll be back with details of some other good for hand-cutting fonts next week.

Twisted

A challenge over on UKS asked for us to scrap our superstitions, or failing that, our quirky habits.  Now I'm not particularly superstitious, apart from the not walking under ladders thing, which is just plain common sense really, oh and the old throwing salt over the left shoulder thing, and did I mention the magpie counting thing?  No, not superstitious at all!  So I started thinking about quirky habits ... and decided that most of those were NOT to be shared publicly if I wished to step outside of the house ever again!  Then one day in the kitchen, I realised that I was doing something that nobody else in my family can see the sense in, but which I love doing, even though it takes a while and there are probably Lakeland or Betterware gadgets that can do it in half the time.  Namely, preparing a fresh pineapple.  Nearly 30 years ago my sister in law Zen showed me the Phillippino way to cut away the skin (peel?) and remove the eye spots and I was hooked!  I love the way Nature hides mathematical curiosities away and I find it really relaxing to reveal the spiral hidden away inside a pineapple.  Twisted I know!

I love the way a pleasing spiral appears as I remove the eye spots from a fresh pineapple.  
It's a shame to cut it into chunks!

The other part of the challenge was to scrap in a different way to your usual style.  Now I'm not sure I have a style, so I chose to try a couple of new techniques: spritzing as that seems to be in vogue, and keeping the whole thing fairly minimal with a hint of stash creeping into (or off) the page the way that the fashionable scrappers on DTs do at the moment.  I've used a sketch from Sketchy Thursdays' November guest DT call.

While I had a few spray bottles to hand I didn't actually have any commercial mists, so I had to make my own.  They didn't turn out too badly actually: some dilute acrylic paint for the lime green, and some dilute ink with a spoonful of face bronzing powder for the orangy brown! The bottles did clog occasionally and needed a shake or two, releasing a few large drops onto the page - totally on purpose of course! 

I'd stuck my title letters down lightly so that they would act as a mask and reveal a clear outline once removed.  My orginal intention had been to paint all the title letters with acrylics afterwards, but the two white GinX coaster letters were rather pretty after the spritzing, so I decided to keep them as they were.
A little layering with some strips from a Hambly screen print, some sewing and a few clear pebbles later and I was done!  Note to self - punching through acetate is not necessarily that great for the punch - I may have broken my 1" circle punch :o(
Hubby is applying WD40 as I type!

Now if only somebody would invent a sewing machine that tied off its own ends I would be a happy bunny, because I don't find that relaxing at all!