Delovely

I liked my paper flowers so much and I couldn't wait to add them to a layout. I made the "Butterfly Girl" layout above and tried to add the flower but it didn't look right. I made the layout below and the flower works well on this page. My friend Amy pointed me in the direction of Page Maps, which helped me put these pages together. They have some great sketches on there and I like all the little details they include. The papers are all from the Delovely collection by Cosmo Cricket.

Lovely paper flowers

I've been thinking about adding texture to my pages and I found a tutorial for water distressed cardstock flowers on the "Such a Pretty Mess" blog. I was particularly impressed with this tutorial as I have seen similar tutorials like the beginning of this one using punches, but I don't have those punches. If you scroll down she shows how to make these flowers just using scissors to cut out shapes. I LOVE these flowers! It probably helps that I used the beautiful zingy Delovely papers by Cosmo Cricket.

Me and my girl

I'm taking a year long online photography course at Big Picture with Tracey Clark leading the way. This week's assignment was a self portrait and I tried taking pictures of just me, but then the ginger one wanted to join in on the action and this was my favourite photo. There are some beautiful black and white shots in the class gallery and I tried black and white, but my hair colour is too much a part of who I am and the pictures didn't really represent me so well.

Chippie challenge

I've been playing with my chipboard again as I wanted to make something for the boy's room. I used all the pieces above, so can you guess what I made?

Here he is, and if you want to find out more then check out Bubbly Scrumptious, as this is my post for the week.

Tone on Tone

I've recently decided that I like my scrapbook pages to have texture and maybe in the past there were pages I didn't quite like and weren't sure why, but now I think it was because they were a bit flat. I wanted to have a go at this month's "Build-A-Page" sketch challenge on the Prima Blog and so I used that sketch and made a tone-on-tone page to highlight the textures, using my favourite photo I took of the ginger one over Christmas.

There's a felt gate and a canvas heart...

and lots Prima Craftable flowers with some pearl centres...
and some wide satin ribbon and chipboard letters, with lots of Antique Linen Distress Ink to add depth.

Sisters

I had a go at January's "Build-A-Page" sketch challenge on the Prima blog and here's my version of the sketch. I'm very pleased to say that they liked it at Prima too and so it appears on their blog here - yay!
If you'd like to see more about it, it's my Bubbly Scrumptious post for today HERE.

New house guests

Look who's come to live in my house! On my continuing mission to make my house a more creative and inspiring place to be I decided I wanted to have a mobile hanging up in our living room. I had a good look around (mostly on Etsy) and found this one. I coudn't get the right angle to photograph my one so this is the picture from Etsy. Here's the link to see more about it.

It's made by "a collective of women from semi-rural, economically disadvantaged areas in Mexico" using recycled materials, through a program called PEACE.

I really like how it looks and the birds bob gently around on their wires. I also love how this is a craft item that genuinely makes a difference to someone.