Country heart & home book giveaway

Debbie over at Country Heart & Home has recently had her book published, Gifts From Your Kitchen (well done Debbie), & she is now holding a giveaway where you could (& I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I will) win a copy.

UKS pre-crop challenges: Design Tips for Dummies

Taniwha created a video, using her design background, to show us a few tricks of the trade when it comes to designing layouts, what works & what doesn't. She also made a class to follow to create a page. Heres the one I made.....

Plenty of washi tape with a colour scheme of red & black (as they are so stereotypically oriental) & blue (to match the main other colour in the photo)

UKS pre-crop challenge: Negatives

A challenge to use a negative from a die cut this time, layering & matting it up...

With the weather so grey and having to have the lights on , trying to get a nice photo of this card was rather hard, and I didnt manage to pick up the lovely details of the background paper at all, but this does give you an idea of what my card looked like.

The background is lilac with pale flowers, onto that I stamped the "Thank You" stamp and embossed with silver. I mounted the die cut piece of card above this on foam pads, before matting on purple card & onto the main card. I love these duo stamps & die cutters, another thing to add to my Christmas list :)

UKS pre-crop challenges: Perfect Day

When I see bunting I either think babies, or celebrations, so when I saw the completed page for A Perfect Day on UKScrappers I knew what photo I wanted to use...

Though the actual UKScrappers Birthday crop starts today I shall be sharing with you a couple more pre-crop challenges with you this week to start a fresh, and upto date with any crop pages I make next week.

UKS pre-crop challenges: Time Travellers Wife

Have you ever looked back through the classes from the previous ukscrappers crops? I hadn't, & they are wonderful! This challenge was to do just that, look back at the old classes & follow one of them (updating as necessary). I followed one from the Scrappy Little Xmas cyber crop 2010 called Forced smile, & heres my interpretation.....

This is my favourite pre-crop challenge :)

UKS pre-crop challenge: Ways to use TAGS

I dont use tags very often, but have decided I need to more often now ... with a little bit of work they can make awesome journalling tags. I think a large tag die shall be put upon my Christmas list.

These are journalling tags I've done for Halloween, or similar, scrapbook pages.

I also made a copper tag, with the thought of using it as a card topper, but having finished it I think I may use it as a hanging ornament, maybe even as a gift.

This tag was die cut out of a sheet of copper. I then embossed it with an embossing folder, stamped it with clocks and heat embossed with a copper coloured embossing powder. I heated up the copper, initially with a heat gun & then bunged parts of it on the hob because I got bored waiting for it. This altered the colour of the copper, ranging from oranges, reds and through to a purpley white. It also burnt the embossing powder a bit, but this added to the look. I finished off by stamping the birds and the verse "the journey awakens the soul", which were heat embossed in black.

UKS pre-crop challenge: Foxglove

This was a class on UKScrappers, on making a page with hexagons. The original design was using foxgloves but I adapted this for photos of Kai taking his first walk outside.

The footprints I stamped using foam I'd cut into shoe shapes & cut patterns into.

I was a little disappointed by how many of the smaller hexagons I ended up covering up, but was very happy with the colours, title and footprints.

Anyone else joining in the pre-crop challenges on UKS?

UKS Pre-crop challenge: Birthday Card

Over at UKScrappers we are getting ever closer to the 10th Anniversary Cybercrop and I've been having a go at some of the challenges. The first one being to make a birthday card using the UKS colours of blue, red & white.

Scrapbooking: With Grandad in the Garden

ANFSCD 1. With the photos mainly showing blacks, greens, yellows & white I used these as my colour palette for the page,

The journalling card at the bottom right originally had "passport" at the top, but when I placed the photo over it I found I could reduce it down to "sport", which suited the page a lot better.

Scrapbooking: Good things come to those who wait

ANSFCD 3: I was looking through a few photos to use on this layout when I came across these 2 and knew I'd have to do a black and white layout.

I stamped the images, loving the raffle tickets, but they took aaaaaaaaaages dry, getting a little bit smudged as I tried to work around them. I added a bit of gold, such as the squares of card and butterflies to reflect the gold Guinness harp.

The title reads "Good things come to those who wait"

Scrapbooking: The ABCs of Babysitting

I've lately been catching every bug going, as well as a prolonged case of Benign Positional Vertigo. Of course, being me, this couldn't be simply helped by using the Epley Manouvere combined with antihistamines, I developed a bad reaction to the medication which made me even worse.

Needless to say my brains been rather fuggy so I went looking for simple scrapbooking tutorials and came across "Now for something completely different" on UKScrappers, tutorials by Shimelle
I didnt need to think about layout, just the colours.

I started with February's, and enjoyed doing the layering effect of punch edged papers.

scrapbooking: School of Fish

A page largely covered with photos this time following week 13 of 52 weeks step by step.

Scrapbooking: Rolling Over

The third red & white page in a row, probably as, along with black I love this striking colour combination.

Week 14 of 52 layouts step by step. I took my inspiration for the papers and colours from the winnie the pooh "toadstool" base of Kai's playgym. Therefore this page is very red, white & dotty. I also won, among other things,  some toadstool stamps in a game of bingo on UKScrappers which went well with this page.

Scrapbooking: Will you Marry Me?

I'd been saving these photos for just the right layout and papers,

I followed week 15 from 52 layouts step by step, and used Echo Parks, yours truly collection kit.

Scrapbooking: High Heels

I think all children, be they female or male, have a curiosity with their Mummy's/Nanny's/Aunties High heels, I know both my lads, when little, would go straight for my high heel shoes, ignoring the flats, to try & walk in them. I had the same curiosity as a child, but it turned more into a competition with myself in how high a heel I could walk normally in.

I used another tutorial from 52 layouts step by step, week 16 - the lace tie to the page went so well with the photos I wanted to use. I stuck to red white & black to make not only Kai stand out more but also the shoes.

Scrapbooking: A Thrifty Gifty Meet Up

With booking myself on a crafty bloggers weekend for next year my mind wandered to the first crafty meet up I attended, & with that I decided to scrap it...

 I followed week 17 from 52 layouts step by step, and matched the colours on the page with the main ones in the photos, blue, red & black.

I made some lovely friends that day.

Scrapbooking: Baby-sitting

 2 Challenges with 1 layout, woohoo :)

The ukscrappers September week 3 challenge was to...
- Use shades of pink
- use scraps of patterned paper
- add lots of bling and/or apply mist, inks or paint
- use the sketch provided

We also had a fun bingo night (which I won, yay!) with our blue brads house where we were also given the challenge of doing a layout using blue and new.

So heres my pages for them....

 I used the original sketch for the 1 page & then flipped it for the other, using scraps of pink patterned paper for hexagons on the "girl" side, & blue for the boys.

As I'm sure you can understand, I have blurred out my sleeping nephews face as he'd be the only recognisable  one after a couple of weeks (we all know how fast babies grow and change).