Number Loving

The first challenge is up over on the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog and it's certainly challenging: a project explaining why you love <fill in the blank> but with no photo ... just journalling!

Hmmmm!
It is February, which means Valentine's ... but I don't do lovey dovey!
Hmmmm indeed!!

Luckily I remembered that last November (on 10.11.12) I listed 10 reasons why I love numbers and I thought it would make a fun addition to my Book Of Me:

The page is (loosely) based on the January sketch from The Sampler Kit Club but I wanted to try out a fun technique with modelling paste and a stencil and this resulted in my background containing somewhat less white space than the sketch.  I've added some Making Memories heart brads (coloured with red and black Sharpies) to my January Counterfeit Kit supplies.  The 10 reasons why I think numbers are great are listed in full here if you are curious.

This challenge will be the theme of the CKCB's Member Blog Hop later in the month - if you want to join in please let them know by the 15th - it would be great to see what you come up with.

Spot The Difference!

The third challenge this month at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog is to make two cards with the same design: one masculine version and one feminine.

This got me thinking about what makes a card suitable for one sex or the other.  Looking in the shops, the girly cards have flowers, shoes, handbags ... and the manly ones feature boats, footballs or power tools!  Hmmm, not every woman spends a fortune on handbags (or wants to), nor does every man like to fish!

Anyway, my cards rarely feature objects these days - they're just made with scraps from my kits, so I guess that just left me colour ... pink for a girl and blue for a boy perhaps?

I decided to start with a card sketch and see how small a difference I could get away with using scraps from my October Counterfeit Kit.  The Sampler Kit Club has a great card sketch challenge this month which I stuck very closely to:

Identical in design, I just used slightly different coloured dots from the Echo Park Lazy Days paper and then picked out one of the dot colours with my kit's tiny alphas and buttons. {I'm very irritated by the Cosmo Cricket Tiny Type teal stickers ... WHY is that "A" so ridiculously small?  The "R" and "T" are also shorter than the rest of the letters ... is it a coincidence that they spell "art" or do I smell a "rat"?}

While the card on the right is definitely more feminine (thanks to the pink), I can't really say that the other one is only suitable for a man.  My Mum reckoned I should have included more brown ...

What do you think?

A Sampler Quilt

Just over a week ago I was happily scrapping with 14 lovely ladies at The Second Green Buttons' Retreat (the Remix).  We had a weekend of crafting and chatting and chocolate :o)   I gave a quick class on stitching with templates and happily listened while others shared their expertise.  Ruth showed us three brilliant ways to use up our scraps and I knew straight away that this was a technique I could use for the first challenge of the month over at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog: to take inspiration from a quilt. 

What's more I have finally made a start with the photos from our 2004 Florida holiday!  We all look so young (and thin) in the pictures ... my diet has restarted with a vengeance!  Not that I'm in this particular photo - there were only four wigs to try on so I stayed safely behind the camera!

The scraps are from my October Counterfeit Kit (OK I know I haven't shared any pages made with the kit yet, but this was a scraps class) with the addition of some Polka Dot Bazzill, Sizzlits Trixie die-cut title, Studio G stamps and a few brads.  I used this lovely sketch from The Sampler Kit Club's September Challenge too:

If you are inspired by a quilt pattern then please do link up over at the CKCB - check back soon for the pages I made which created these scraps!!