A Short Break

There'll be a brief vacation on this blog because I'm heading over to France for a couple of weeks. I'll be seeking out my favourite sweet treat, the Macaron. I'll be catching up on books and plays. I'll be exploring the countryside and the beaches. And hopefully, I'll find the time to sit with my sketchbook and draw. My bags are packed, my clothes have been thrown into a suitcase and healthy snacks have  been set aside for the journey. So all that's left is for me to say "A bientot mes amis". I'll be back to crafting in no time, when I return :)

Now This Is The Kind of Card I Love to Make

With my attention being directed towards my style of late, I've been scribbling out answers to questions I've been set and filling a smash book full of cuttings plus notes, all in the hope of pinning it down. I'm not fully resolved to it yet and I wonder if I'll always be a creative butterfly flitting from one style to another. But I think my answers are beginning to sink in.

I sat down at my desk and decided on a whim to create a card, without over-thinking the whole process and you know what, I've finished up with a design that I love. I think I will always gravitate towards graphic, whether I shabby it up or keep it clean.

I began by staring at a Spellbinders die of a gate, which I recently purchased but yet hadn't used. It's beautifully ornate. However, I was stumped as to how to incorporate it into a card. A quick snoop on Google threw up the idea of using two of the shapes and creating a fancy, stylish frame from them.

I glued them together & mounted onto the background with foam pads. I die cut out a red label and then a silhouette cameo. I also die cut a small scalloped circle and cut it into quarters and adhered these in place as corner mounts. Finally I created a border using Rangers's Liquid Pearls (Onyx Pearl - my current favourite). All the papers are from Graphic 45's French Country collection.

Now I need to think of more ways to incorporate the gate into paper crafts.

Clean & Simple - Week 6

This will be the last page for the Clean & Simple class where I will be up to date. I'll be on my holidays when the next few lessons are posted, so expect me to be playing catch up when I return.

This week, Cathy wanted us to experiment with Extreme Minimalism. And well, for the most part I did stick with the design but I couldn't quite keep the whole page as a clean white canvas.

I had to just help it along with a texture but I did at least keep it as soft and subtle as I could.

I have to say i'm not sure about the theme but i'm going with it. Cathy is encouraging the idea of creating layouts which tell an honest story of our lives and not always the picture perfect view we normally capture. I have no problem with scrapbook albums being given a makeover and showing only happy smiley memories. But equally, I am willing to include a photo with journalling that I might not wish to look back on.

It's a digital layout so it's easy to hide on the computer or if I wish, place in the wastebasket. I'm sure it's a problem that many people have. Do they want to remember their loved ones as they were before illness or as the person they became because of it? I'm sure there's a place for both memories but ask me on another day and I may change my mind.

Time will tell.

Mojo Monday Thank You Card

Outside it was raining and grey & well, I fancied putting a card together, so headed over to Mojo Monday for inspiration. Somedays I just love to have a little kick start to rev up those flagging creative juices. 

I followed the sketch more or less exactly as it was, using papers from Prima's Craftsman & Melody collections. The stitching was created by drawing onto the paper with a white Uniball Signo pen, which was much less hassle than digging out the sewing machine and actually adds quite a groovy effect.

The leaves were punched out and the twigs came from a Spellbinders set. The flowers were created from die cut flower shapes, using dark purple cardstock, balled up and glued together.

Nice & easy whilst having the added bonus of being wonderfully calming to piece together. Don't ask me why but there's something meditational about sifting through coloured papers, choosing combinations that you hope will blend perfectly well with each other. Plus I get a kick out of creating my own embellishments.

And you know what? I don't do it nearly often enough :)

Wall Decoration

I've had these papier mache punctuation marks hanging around my craft room for donkey's years gathering dust. They were on sale at a craft show along with letters of the alphabet. I couldn't think of a word I wanted to make but I loved the abstract nature of just having the punctuations.

I've kept them very simple, no fancy embellishments, just patterned paper, gleaned from Graphic 45's Olde Curiosity Shoppe and Tropical Travelogue collections.

I simply laid the symbols onto the back of the paper and drew around their shapes in black pen. I cut a rough outline out and glued the symbols to the paper. I frilled the border with scissors and glued it to the sides before adding the side strips.

And now they adorn my craft room wall.

Clean & Simple Week 5

My poor little blog will feel neglected soon. I haven't sat down and crafted or sketched anything at all recently. So nothing to show. I have spent a bit of time re-sorting out my dies into a new filing system but it's not worth photographing. Not unless you want to see plain brown ringbinders with sheets of dies inside.

However, I am still on Cathy Zielske's Clean & Simple course and committed to staying up to date. So I do now have the latest layout to share.

It wasn't a page I could easily create quickly by doing a digital version (which was rather the point of the lesson I think). The crafty Mrs C had designed a hybrid layout for us which included pockets. And as she said in her video presentation, it's not easy to recreate pockets in digital format.

So though there was plenty to do on computer first and print out, there was also a good deal of proper scrapbooking and papercrafting involved. I even dusted off my stamps and added swirls as a border.

As simple as the final result is, it still took about 4 hours from start to finish to make. Who knows how long it would take me if I had to start from scratch and design the template too. It always tickles me when I see articles devoted to creating cards in ten minutes or scrapbooks in half and hour. I've never been able to manage it.

I'm a complete tortoise when it comes to crafting. Old, slow and in need of a tub of daily moisturiser lol. The only difference is that you find me munching on lettuce leaves as a treat!

Hope you are enjoying the bank holiday weekend. I'm off to make some lunch and settle down to watch a Hitchcock film. I realised that though I know the titles of his films, there are a lot of famous movies I've never seen. So far I've been entranced by Spellbound and delighted in Notorious. I think I'll take a peek out the Rear Window next.

Clean & Simple Week 4

I'm being a mega swot again today by completing my homework only hours after the file reached my inbox. In my defence, the template this week was fairly easy. For starters, there was only one photo required and the other design elements were also simple to produce.

This week we had to journal a list about someone special. Naturally I chose my CP/DH/OH/SO or whatever the heck I'm supposed to refer to him as (I still haven't settled on a term I'm happy with). Anyway, I nabbed this photo of him from the file containing the photos from our recent trip to London.

I chose the picture of when I managed to snap a photo, sat outside Laduree, partaking of tea, in the Burlington Arcade. Cathy's advice was to try converting the photo to black & white, for it's advantage in covering up a multitude of design problems and looking arty to boot.

The papers are all Prima. The background comes from the Engraver collection whilst all the collaged elements come from Botanical.

I love following Cathy's clean style for this course and I adore the resulting pages but I know that it's more CZ than me in the design. I'm soooo tempted to start adding more dimension and elements to it and take it further away from CAS & more into another style altogether. Though I am pleased to be doing scrapbook layouts again. I hadn't realised how much I'd missed it.