Wednesday love: Collective nouns

Time for a little midweek happiness and this is what is making me very happy at the moment - my new picture in the lounge. I LOVE this! Following on from last week's "Alphabet Love", this is all about collective nouns. I adore the colours and there is something about a printed image like these which really appeals to me. I bought the unframed version of this print and then had it framed at our local framing shop - keeping it local.

This picture is by Woop Studios. They also produce greetings cards, alphabet flashcards and a gorgeous alphabet book.

Back to basics - designing and drawing

I have signed up to an online class called "Reign Repeats" with Majo Bautista V which is all about designing repeat patterns (for textiles?) using Adobe Illustrator on the Skillshare website. I decided to sign up as my IT skills are extremely lacking and I need to get back to basics with my drawing and designing too. It's a really fun class with some super students sharing their work. So here's my project so far...

We had a project brief of "Picnics" and so I started with a brainstorm...

Then I explored the wonderful world of Pinterest and came up with these mood boards, putting the images together on Picmonkey.

(Loving the bright colours, the tupperware and the cute faces in the Bento boxes)

Then I got out my watercolours and started doodling...

This is still the very early stages of a project and my other half has some big work stuff going on at the moment so I won't be able to get to the computer to do the Illustrator side of things for a little while. In the meantime I can just keep doodling :)

Wednesday Love: Alphabet love

I love fonts, and different representations of alphabets and quotes written in beautiful lettering. To celebrate the start of my friend Faye's new e-course "The Art of Typography" I thought I would share a couple of my favourite alphabets with you.

The video at the top shows you a book I have with a pop-up alphabet. I've always been fascinated by pop-ups and these are so clever.


Click HERE to see another amazing alphabet video which is described as "playing with different techniques and materials into little and big spaces...where each character visually represents the meaning of the word itself". In summary - it's really fascinating!

Bake for Books

At the girls' school they are having a fundraising effort to raise money for new books for the school library called Bake for Books. We are having bake sales on occasional Fridays and each year is taking it in turns to host the sale. There is also a competition to see which year can raise the most money - nothing like bringing out the competitive nature of mums!! It was our turn this Friday and I baked loads of cakes and biscuits. I had a go at two new recipes.

The first one was Rainbow Cookies. These were a great recipe for a bake sale as they have to be made the day before and left in the fridge overnight before slicing. I also added to the recipe by adding 100g melted chocolate and sprinkles to one end. The recipe is here. It really does make nearly 4 dozen biscuits!

This was the other recipe I tried - Whoopie Pies! They were yummy and this recipe had melted marshmallows in the middle. They aren't as pretty as the rainbow cookies, but a little icing sugar dusted on the top made them a bit more presentable . The recipe is here. I wouldn't bother with the optional melted chocolate on the top as they are definitely sweet enough.

And the news just in is we have raised over £270 and we are in second place. The total raised so far is over £1000 !

Back to the 80's - a neon page

I had a play with my new neon embossing powders and rollerskating seemed like the perfect page to use them on as it felt very 80's taking my girls skating ( the last time I had rollerskates on!).

I used a "build a bloom" stamp set from Banana Frog to make a background with the black teardrop shape, which I then used to go over the top with the embossing powders.

I used the embossing powder to colour a wooden camera shape by Prima too.

I carried on with the neon using page markers from Paperchase.

I couldn't resist this rollerskate stamp from My Minds Eye (from the My Girl set) for this page.

I love the pop of the neon and I think I'm going to have fun playing with the embossing powders in the future.

Wednesday love: Neon

Ooooo - look what's arrived in the post for me! Six neon embossing powders by American Crafts. I am loving the neon and having lots of fun playing with embossing powders, which feels very "old school" as I haven't used embossing powders for years. I think they will look great with papers from Amy Tangerine's sketchbook collection from American Crafts.

I couldn't resist this too!...

Come back tomorrow to see my first page with neon embossing powders.

Brownie promise layout

Quite a simple layout from me today with a patterned paper and a few bits of washi tape as the base for the page. I wanted to frame the photo a bit so I used a white Neocolor crayon over the top of the patterned paper and used a wet paintbrush to blend it. I thought I would stamp out the words from the Brownie enrollment after seeing the second layout on this blog post by Ashley Calder.

I love this patterned paper from the Color Me Happy collection by Glitz Designs. I've used some of the lovely rainbow chevron washi tape from the same collection too. As a Brownie leader I couldn't resist buying the Owl singleton stamp from Maya Road that's been used on this page.

Wednesday love: a stone's throw to the sea

I love living in a seaside town. It's short walk and we are by the sea. Standing on the beach listening to the waves and taking a few deep breaths of sea air and it feels like I'm on holiday.

Throwing pebbles in the sea makes such a satisfying splash!

Another mist background

I continued to have fun with my mists and play with the Heidi Swapp Color Magic resist paper to make the background for this layout. This layout is closer to the original page by Yasmin Tolche that inspired these pages.

I really like how the colours of the mists work together with the shell pattern. This is a photo I've struggled to scrap for ages but this background really makes the colours pop.

I saw some torn chevrons on a layout in the latest issue of Scrap365 by Sheena Rowlands. I really like them.

I'm following the fashion for speech bubbles here. It ties in well with my love of all things comic book.

Heidi Swapp Color Magic Backgrounds

I saw this layout recently by Yasmin Tolche and I love the background she has created using some Color Magic resist paper from Heidi Swapp. I had a packet of these papers and so I had a go with my mists.

These were the colours I started with...

I started with the lightest first ...

Followed by the other colours...

Finally I turned it over onto the newspaper underneath to remove the excess ink and here's how it turned out.

This is my finished layout using some Sassafras Lass elements , Basic Grey patterned paper and some torn book paper.
                                                   

I also found some Dr Seuss stickers in my stash and the book in the picture is by Dr Seuss. We love Dr Seuss!

Another mist background to come tomorrow.