Cards: Alcohol inks & Encaustic Art

We had an arty lesson on the cardmaking course, with chalks, stamps, inks, encaustic art and more to play with, this was the lesson I was most looking forward to & it did not disappoint.

I loved playing with the alcohol inks, dotted onto dabbers along with a blending solution & dabbed onto photo paper or shiney paper.
Once dry I either used it to stamp on or as a background...

These are toppers I created, ready for putting on cards

I embossed some silver card with this one before inking it, I love this embossing folder. I coloured in the digi stamp with promarkers to match the colours on the card & layered it onto black card.

I used this technique again with this card....

...but this time the digi stamp is mounted onto some encaustic art I did and a ribbon I ruffled. I have to admit, I'm not very good at encaustic art yet, though it is only my second time trying it (first time was 8 years ago), I look forward to practising it some more in the future (anyone want to buy me a starter kit, lol).

Trying putting the wax onto an embossed surface, I'm not sure what I'll do with it but I think it looks pretty cool.

Trying the 2 techniques together, first encaustic & then inking. Not yet finished yet, I think a stamped image in the centre in black or similar to complete it.

I would like to enter the purple card into the "Just inspirational challenge" week 33

Scrapbooking: A Hoppy Meet Up

I decided to use this months creative craft world challenge sketch as a starting point for this page, I then went looking through my scrap collection for pinks, whites (to match the majority of bunny ears) and rabbits. The majority of it came from the CCW 2011 July Kit. I left the title slightly ambiguous by using a flower so it could be read as Happy or Hoppy.

The Summer of Colour 2012 #1

Over at Twinkle Twinkle it is the summer of colour! Each week an inspiring ice cream image will be posted, inspiring because all who join in take the colours from that flavour to work with. This weeks was Rainbow Sherbet. This is my FAVOURITE flavour, I usually have it from Millies cookies with blueberry sherbet as well, yummy! The colours however are so NOT me, lol, they are quite scary, bright pink with orange, yellow & a bit of white, even more scary when most of my scrapbooking is done with photos of my lads who themselves usually have very little to do with those colours. I saw it as a challenge & faced it head on & ended up rather pleased with the result.......

A simple layout but I think it shows everything up nicely. The pinks & oranges reflect the heat so much in the photos though the photo of the page doesnt show the vibrance of the papers enough.

Thank you to Carmen for introducing me to this event, & to Kristin for running it.

Scrapology June Challenge

You know when you sometimes see a scrap page & its just perfect, you wouldnt change anything about it, well thats how I felt about this months page on Scrapology by  Rô Phillipson. I hope she doesnt mind but I literally scraplifted everything .... well, everything that I could with what I had in, which was pretty much all the stock she used, yay!

This is the first time I've totally copied a page, so I guess this blog post is showing my skills on scrap lifting!

52 layouts step by step #1

My UKS team mate, Niki, has started a fab task on her blog , every week she'll showing how to do one of her beautiful layouts with very clear photos and instructions. You can see the first one HERE. I'm hoping to play along each week, so heres my take on this weeks....

Challenge links & Front Pages

Thank you so much to everyone who left me links for challenges, I shall be making a list of them in the sidebar shortly so not only can I find them all together easily but so you can have a look as well.

Since thursday I have managed to get 10 pages done, 8 single page layouts & 2 double page layouts. For me this is fairly amazing as I only usually manage to get 2 done a week maximum, it takes me a day to do just one.
My albums are all made up of individual layouts for each event, no theme going through the album except that its in chronological order with the date & journalling on show. I now have about 10 layouts left until I finish my 2010 albums (I've had to split it into 2 albums as just 1 wasnt big enough). With this achievement looming, & for me to finish a year of photos in scrapbook form it will be an achievement, I was wondering what I should have as the first page.  I've tried googling this topic & havent found many articles on it.

Maybe I should have a title page? 2010 made up of random photos from the year.
Maybe a contents page.
A letter giving the highlights of 2010, a bit like those annual round-up letters I get from the odd person at Christmas.
I've heard of writing hopes & dreams for the year ahead, which though a nice idea, doesnt quite work seeing that 2010 has already been & gone.

So how do you organise your albums & what do you have as a first page? I'd love to know.

I'm up for a scrapbook challenge.....

Hello my lovely followers, its been a busy ol' month & I have plenty to show you, just need to find the time & the right state of mind to sit & tell you about it all. I've recently got my mindset back into scrapbooking after a bit of a dry spell & seem to have over done it, lol. I'm running empty when it comes to ideas, I'm trawling the blogs for challenges & was wondering what are YOUR favourite challenge & motivational scrap sites?
Please help me out & leave me some links :)