XOXO Blog Hop!

Hey there hopping XOXO Girls! (And hey to everyone else who ain't hopping!)

The True XOXO Girls blog has been going through some changes lately, so to round them all off we've decided to have a blog hop.

First, a little bit about me. I'm a very recently married, lindy-hopping, vintage-loving, dog-owning, punky but shy scrapper. I live in Brussels, Belgium, and am lucky enough to work from home so whenever the need takes me I can just pop into my craft room and get scrapping. At the moment I am loving stars, paint, texturiser, circles and ink.

If you've just come to visit me but would like to start the blog hop, begin here. As ever, there is a prize! And this time, it is immense!

The overall prize for the person who completes the blog hop: a Guest Design Team spot for True XOXO for December! Completing the blog hop means commenting on every single member of the team's blog. There are also RAKs along the way, depending on how generous or organised people are, and whether they suffer from stash overflow or not (me, I'm in the Not Organised category this time. I am, however, planning to sort through my stash and offer a RAK when my follower numbers reach 100... not far to go!).

Now, there was a twist to the challenges for this blog hop. Each member challenged another member, so all the challenges are different - and I can tell you, we are a diverse bunch! I was challenged by Ana Oxendale-White (who you should have come to me from if you're hopping right) to make a layout inspired by a road sign.

All I could think about for a long time was how I didn't have my own version of that classic photo: the American desert, a lone roadsign, a deep blue sky, sand and dust, nothing else around, inevitably hipstamaticised or instagramised. I didn't have my own version of that photo. But oh, how I wanted it.

After a couple of weeks I fished around in my brain and caught all the swirling ideas. I dipped into our hard drive of pictures and emerged with one that was just right for me to mess around with in Paint.net:

this is it post-production

Then I set to work with my haul of ideas. I wanted to get that feel of brightness the classic road sign photo evokes in me, so setting it all against a dark background was important for me. I also added some shapes that were reminiscent of signs, and a couple of casino-inspired embellishments to point at the desert part of my vision. The electric blue and purple paint splotches are almost hidden by the clusters of paper but I wouldn't be without them.

So there you go. I in turn challenged Emma Ruth Cruz-Fronda to make me smile with some awesome nu-school/old-school tattoo-inspired work - I mean anchors, nautical stars, swallows, hearts and barbed wire, bright colours and thick black outlines. Go check out what Emma did - you won't be disappointed. I wasn't!