Metal Breakdown

That mini album I made for Dublin – the one with no photos – gave rise to not one, not two, but three video tutorials for Gauche Alchemy. The first one showed the structure of the mini. I think we missed the second one, about getting messy with paint and textures of backgrounds. (You can see them all here.)

And then there’s the third, about how to achieve a faux metal look from foil paper:

The Gauche Alchemy team is riding high at the moment – there are lots of achievements, great techniques and fabulous little projects going on, so if you’re feeling stuck for inspiration or fancy trying something new, pop over to the GA blog.

That's all for now!

Dublin in Mini

...nope, not in a mini, just in mini. In a mini album, in a mini weekend, in a minimally tourist and maximally family visiting kind of way.

I fancied folding some pieces of card to make a mini album of all the fantastic photos I was gonna take when we went to visit Dublin... but then I got ill, spent the whole of the Thursday in bed in the hotel, and then most Friday and Saturday with family. Plus my SD card decided that no, the nice photos I took on my solitary stroll around on Friday morning were not good enough, and converted them into randomly gigantic encrypted messes. It was easier to try to recreate the stroll and the photos than to work out how to save them from my evil SD card.

So the result is a mini album so far empty of photos but eagerly waiting. I happened to film the process for Gauche Alchemy, and you can also find the video on the 'my videos' page on this here blog of mine.

There are two more videos to go along with this one. They show specific techniques used in the making of this mini - but you'll have to wait! They'll be out later this month. For now, a little taster of the mini album:

I spy Gauche Alchemy products!

See that ouchless cardboard? The coaster? The foil paper? All GA, baby! Go have a look at the GA blog and shop, and at my video too. And do let me know if you've had any annoying or even heart-wrenching experiences with digital images, cameras and SD cards. In my experience sharing is cathartic (plus it'll make me feel a little better to know I'm not the only sufferer).

The Handmade Wedding

You've all seen by now all the handmade things the wedding brought along - now it's time to scrap about it all!

The sketch this week at Scrapbook Challenges made me so happy about sketches and scrapbooking. It was one of those moments when you've been waiting to scrap a certain idea or certain photos for a long time, and one day the answer just pops up.

The sketch looks like this:

And after I put my page together it looked like this:

Scrapbook Challenges sketch #285

What I used for this page: Doodlebug Love Potion patterned paper, Echo Park Style Essentials Upscale Black Quatrefoil and Grey Dots & Stripes patterned paper, Echo Park Happy Days patterned papers & alpha stickers, Rayher wooden hearts and bobbins, Toga chipboard alphas.

Quite to my surprise, I'm building up our wedding album pretty quickly. And it's looking pretty sweet.

Get over to Scrapbook Challenges for this sketch, and all of the March Madness going on this month. As ever, you could win something for your participation!

Roots

In the middle of a storm of user rights, copyrights, intellectual property rights, and generally a whole lotta difficulty, rumour, uncertainty and confusion, True XOXO has challenged its DT to be inspired by Pinterest this month.

And what did we do? Pushed on regardless. Inspiration and interpretation are ours this month.

Pinterest, for me, at least before this storm came a-brewin', firstly an explosion of visual stimulation, and secondly, a place where I dream about the house that we are currently looking for. From that angle I have scrapped a photo of our little family and how we are putting down roots in this here city, as well as incorporating aspects that I think are visually stimulating, like bright colours contrasted with dark ones, patterned paper shapes, and a little airplain effect that I'm already very fond of!

 Go check out the new XOXO blog and join in with the challenge - you could win a guest DT spot!

I Go Out Walking...

A little while ago I showed the sneakiest of peeks of a project I’m going to be working on all year. Well, today’s the day for the big reveal over at Gauche Alchemy!

I always knew I was collecting postcards for a reason. (Apparently I have a bit of a thing for them.) Turns out this is it. I used to have hundreds covering my bedrooms walls at university – you know, the kind they give out as flyers or adverts or art – but they were long gone, recycled in one of my fits of ruthless cleaning over the years. Now, each time we go to a bar or museum or someplace similar we pick up the interesting ones, and the collection was starting to add up again. So now is my chance to give them all a reason to exist! Read on…

My aim for this year is to make up a mini book, filled with 52 postcards, each of which is scrapped with a photo taken during a weekly walk, with each photo inspired by a weekly prompt. The idea’s not new, I know, but I did think that the Scrapbook Challenges forum could benefit from a year-long project like this, so that is where you can find the prompts and members’ responses to those prompts if you’re interested in playing along (some catching up will be required by now, but the load is not too much. Besides, the prompts are guaranteed to get you thinking!).

I WILL stick to this project

this Gauche Alchemy boot wasn’t made for walking, it was made for adorning my mini book

go out walking - you might find dinosaurs (or other exciting stuff)

I’ve been keeping to the programme on the photograph front, and I’m almost up to date on the scrapping, too. Here’s what I’ve done so far, photograph-wise:

Thanks to Gauche Alchemy and their eclectic array of products, I was able to pick and mix and create a cover for this mini book that was perfectly suited to the theme of going on walks and taking photos. Here’s how the cover came together:

Products I used (all from Gauche Alchemy)

Color Kits – It’s All Gravy, Blue Streak, Purple People Eater

PVC Punchinella

Ouchless Cardboard
Mail Art kit
Nearly Nekkid kit

Regular Punchinella

I can’t tell you strongly enough how easy it is to come up with projects from the GA Color Kits – with them, a project pretty much makes itself. For example, I’ve nearly used up the whole Banana Hammock kit (even though it’s a difficult colour for me), and I’ve got a project in the pipeline using the (peach?) kit which is a colour I NEVER thought I’d use. On top of everything they’re great value because you get a lot of bits and pieces and some really unusual items in them. (I’ll tell you a secret… when I applied to be part of the Gauche Alchemy DT, they asked me which of their products I liked the best. I spent a paragraph gushing about how inspiring these Color Kits were – and that was just from the product photos in the GA Artfire store! Now I’ve got my hands on them – wow. I have not been disappointed!)

A Day to be Proud

Such a busy month for layouts! - It's a good thing I have so many photos to scrap these days.

Scrapbook Challenges has another sketch up on the forum - this time, there's a bit of choice, with different photo formats and different size pages. It certainly makes for a good challenge!

I chose this sketch:

why was I scared of this sketch?

...which is actually squashed up a bit in order to make an A4-sized layout - something I normally like doing, but just to be difficult I stretched it out again to fit the regular 12x12.

My layout, I confess, came together very quickly. The reason? I was scared.

Scrapbook Challenges sketch #283b

Why on earth was I scared? Well... I talked (boasted?) here about how my layouts hardly reflect the sketches I take inspiration from these days. BOOM! That was the sound of me falling back to earth. I am trying to keep a 'togetherness' in my wedding photos - for example, I've used a certain Tim Holtz Bitty Grunge circle stamp somewhere on each page (even here, although you can't see it) - and in that framework I just couldn't see any room for manoeuvrability with this sketch. I didn't want to experiment and mess up the continuity of my wedding album. Perhaps I didn't want to distort the sketch too much because I wasn't feeling confident that day. Mainly I just didn't want a dud page in my collection. So I stuck to the sketch like glue and the result is a verrrrrrrrrry clean layout - almost boring, I find.

The colours work, and I changed the matting paper to a frame, but otherwise it's not much different. I get that the challenge isn't to take a sketch and interpret it to oblivion, but I guess judging by my recent interpretations I was expecting a bit more from myself.

At the end of the day, I am happy with it as a page in my wedding album, and since that was my primary objective, I can say I've succeeded! Perhaps a break from wedding photos is in order?

A Recipe of All Sorts

When I cook, I rarely follow recipes to the letter. Sometimes because I disagree with them, but often because I am lacking an ingredient or two and have to improvise. The only exception is when I'm baking - then, it's essential to follow recipes to the letter. That, I'm happy with.

But following a Punky Scraps recipe to the letter is a whole different story. This month, I really struggled to make a cohesive page... but that's why it's called a challenge!

I needed a helping hand, so I used this sketch:

I found on this very talented lady's blog (who I discovered via Scrapbook.com) and it was designed by this scrapper.

And I tried really, really hard to follow the recipe. Here is my layout:

Punky Scraps challenge #42

Now I can take a step back I can analyse where I think I went wrong with this layout - I started with a patterned paper, and had to work around the pattern on the base layer. In the end I did end up working it into the design - the idea is is that the raindrops are turning into hearts, or the hearts are flying up and stopping the rain, so I'm happy with the symbolism of that part. In the end it turned out fine, I guess, but it was a struggle when I was putting it together!

The recipe (and my rendering of it):
Hexagons (raindrops)
White paint (behind the title)
Make a grid (the background paper and the map paper)
Use small photos (yup - too small for you to see properly!)
NO PINK (ooops.... realised at the last minute that the background paper has pink on it)
Use three circles (two wheels and a button)
Use three squares (the letters)
Use something transparent (red flock transparency semi-circles)

As always, you can go find out what the other members made from this recipe on the Punky blog. We'd love to see what you might come up with too, so please join in!

Rockin' the Sketch

When I made this sketch I tried out something with a sort of multiway title... well, I've tried it again. This time it's a bit simpler, so it works better.

That's me, though. I never start off simple, and then work my way up to something. I always try the hardest thing first, and then cut back when I realise I can't quite make it. What does that say about me, I wonder?

Anyway, here is my layout for this week's Punky Scraps challenge - a very punky sketch from Nat.

it's not just a skull, it's a skull with a 'tache!!!

I actually had a really hard time with this sketch, because it was so white-spacey. I really wanted to stick to the white space, too, but as I worked the page just kept spreading. But in the end, I'm happy with how it looks because I love bright colour on black, even if it is all a bit tidy.

Punky Scraps challenge #41

There's that multiway title I was telling you about - 'he rocks my world' and 'she rocks my world'. I love the speech bubble feature on this page because it is playful and really works as the thoughts of the subjects in the photo.

Go and see what other DT members did - you'll love their creations - and even join in yourself!

Messing Things Up

For the design team at True XOXO this month, the challenge - get messy - was divisive to say the least... but what the challenge has shown, although tough, is that there are MANY different ways you can be messy, and that messy is ALL RELATIVE. I love some of the LOs on this challenge for the personal value - you might not necessarily look at a page and think automatically that it is messy, but once you read the artist's little summary of the page and get to know their 'usual' style, you see how they've gone through a creative process to arrive at the layout.

Mine was intended to truly reflect the messy state of my brain the other week - lack of sleep leads to some interrrrrrrrrrrresting artistic accents, that's for sure!

all kinds of messy

I wanted to get lots of layers on there without turning it into an art journal-style page or mixed media piece, but I think it just looks like I Jackson Pollocked it (I wish!).

Anyway, join in the fun this month and you could win a month-long guest spot on the DT!

Interpretation: The Debate Continues

Following on from my previous post on the Inspiration Debate, I’m going to talk a little bit today about Interpretation, since it’s loosely related to those aforementioned copyright laws and the difficulties involved with intellectual property rights, the internet and so on.

It is very often claimed that any given creation is not a copy of another, it’s an interpretation, which is pretty much like saying ‘it’s OK, I’ve put my own spin on it’. This is OK, until the claims start to be made over creations that are  in fact copies, or uncredited, or both. The problem is that all of this is subjective. You might think something is a rip off of something else, but I might not be able to see it. I absolutely don’t have any answers to this one. Again, it’s a situation that is developing every day, and we are just trying to keep up with the fast-paced changing world of instant online connectivity.

So to completely go the other way and run from the debate, I’ve kind of done the opposite with the layout below. It’s made from a sketch, but it is very loosely based on the sketch. For many reasons (two of them being printer related, causing me to feel like this) I switched things up and did my own thing.

In the past, before I was scrapbooking regularly, I did sometimes look at a layout that was supposedly based on a sketch and wonder how the artist got from sketch to layout, as I couldn’t see any resemblance. Now that I’ve been more active in scrapbooking circles, I see the interpretation process a lot more clearly. And frankly, these days I’m disappointed if a layout is too closely, too precisely based on a sketch – what I find inspiring, like the majority of us, I’m sure, is seeing different people’s different interpretations of a sketch (yep, I used 'different' twice there intentionally). More than that, I find it fascinating that a small group of people like a design team can come up with different layouts for a sketch and no two are even remotely alike.

This is the main reason I love sketches so much these days. Not so much because it takes out of my schedule that extra step of thinking up a design, saving me time; more because the process of getting from sketch to layout is an art in itself.

Look at what I’ve done with Scrapbook Challenges’ sketch this week:

hi, my name's Cheryl and I can't multi-photo scrap

Mine doesn’t look like that. It looks like this:

Scrapbook Challenges sketch #281

I turned the sketch 90 degrees, moved the title position so it diagonally mirrored the original, opted to go for one photo chopped up instead of multiple photos, tried to play around with the title in place of the journalling, and used wavy (literally!) lines instead of straight, moving them from the outside in.

trying to be too clever?

For the title I tried to do something a bit different. (In case you can’t see, there are Heidi Swapp Ghost Alphas on there that spell out ‘Dubrovnik’). It’s (supposed to be) a multi-way title, so you can read it as ‘I love Dubrovnik’, as ‘in Dubrovnik’, as ‘in love’, or as ‘in love in Dubrovnik’. I think I’ll try this again in the future as I didn’t quite get the positioning right on this one (the ‘in’ needed to be closer to the ‘love’, for example, and perhaps I needed to use smaller letters for the ‘Dubrovnik’).

What are your thoughts on interpretation? How far do you like to take a sketch?

If you want to see what the other DT members did, and submit your own layout for a chance to win a prize, visit Scrapbook Challenges. This month, because we feel like sharing the love, there are also extra prize-winning opportunities for new members, so come over and sign up!

Inspiration – The Debate

Everyone talks about inspiration – where theirs comes from, what they use to get inspired, whether it’s an overused term or an undervalued part of life, where it touches borders with copyright infringement and stealing…

… but as far as I’m concerned, human consciousness is one huge living entity anyway. It always has been. It just takes, now and again, one individual in the right place at the right time to stand up and put an amazing idea out there, and then other ideas will spark off of that one and other people will have their own ideas and… so on.

Everything we put out there – whether it be our skills, our talent, or even our personality or our words – is an amalgamated, processed version of everything we’ve ever put in. We absorb information (read inspiration), then we recycle it; or, maybe a better word is upcyle.

In the past this process has gone rather slowly. It went quite slowly for quite a long time, in fact; only in the last 200 years has it sped up. And the acceleration is exponential – now, with the web at our fingertips (and probably soon to be linked directly to our brains), the sharing, processing and reusing of ideas has exploded into a constantly moving, ever-evolving quasi sentient thing where if you sit still for one minute you get left behind. Lawmakers can’t keep up with it, that’s for sure. Intellectual property law has been acknowledged for centuries, albeit unnamed, but only became commonplace a few decades ago, and it and its counterparts haven’t moved fast enough to be effective in providing a good set of reactions to the changing environment.

So where do we turn for inspiration? I talked in my guest post here about turning more and more to sketches… although even this is a foggy area: with so many sketches from different sources each week, and a limited canvas, it’s inevitable that overlaps occur. What do we do, then? Should we be concerned?

I think, at least in the online scrapbooking community, that old rules should still apply and be applied: do unto others as you would have done unto yourself. Or, an it harm none, do thy will. It’s common decency, and common sense. Even though when I look around I think I see mostly people who do not live by the same values as me, I’m somehow still convinced that people willing to be part of a community act in that community with these values in mind. There are always exceptions, of course. But those people, I just keep away from.

So, again, where do we turn for inspiration? If we become too scared of breaking the rules, however fuzzy they are, that we can’t move, there’s no point in continuing. Stasis is… inhuman.

This week, Natalie of Punky Scraps picked out an image for us to be inspired by. I had a ball – in fact, such a good time making a layout from this image that I will return to it again and again as I begin to incorporate some of its elements into my own style. And it made me realise: since she’s been running Punky Scraps, Nat has always offered an inspiration image every month. They’re much more than a colour palette, more than a theme or a style. I don’t know where she gets them, but they really work for me.

big, bold and bright - I love it!

printed rainbows - thanks, Sass!

 

hand-drawn rainbows - thanks, Copic!

loving shadows and shading here

And so, I’ve learned something. We’ve all been told to always look outside of the box. But I’ve actually only just come to understand what this means. Like when you look up into the night sky, and you have to not look directly at a cluster of stars in order to see them all; like doing those magic eye posters; like trying to remember something so hard and then it comes to you when you're in the middle of something else entirely; well, this is the same sort of thing. So, to answer my persistent question of where we can turn for inspiration, I will say, for now, that not going in search of it is the best course of action. Just keep all of your channels open, and it will find a way in.

Wow! Your Parents Really...

When I mentioned here that I didn’t have any resolutions this year as such, but that I did want to scrap more, a very specific part of this wish was to scrap our wedding photos. I can tell you that there won’t be any disappointment or self-flagellation on this front if January is anything to go by – here’s another layout, inspired by this week’s sketch from Scrapbook Challenges. This one’s about my mum and dad at the wedding, and has a frivolous side to it, whilst still remaining stylish and in theme with the rest of the wedding album.

At some point in the build-up to the wedding, my parents were sort of/almost dictating which songs we should have in our playlist. You would think I would have either freaked out, or cottoned on. But evidently I was too distracted. So when the first of their requested songs came on in the evening, and they picked up their feet and started jiving – yes, jiving – my jaw hit the ground like Sebastien the Crab’s in Disney’s The Little Mermaid. When we finally got them off the dance floor they admitted they’d been having secret lessons in the build-up to the wedding. In fact, they went to such lengths to hide the lessons from my brother, who lives at home right now, that they told him they were going out to marriage counselling!

They really got on board with the whole 50s-ish theme – and they loved it. AND they looked incredible. This fact was not missed by anyone – one of our friends said to me, in that voice that sounds surprised because it’s generally unexpected that such a possibility could exist, ‘Wow, your parents really have style!’… and so the title for this layout was born.

The sketch – yet another great one from Scrapbook Challenges:

this is one of THREE different takes on the sketch on offer this week

 And my interpretation:

Scrapbook Challenges sketch #280

Bobbing and Weaving, Ducking and Diving, Picking and Choosing

What feels like a really long time ago I made this tray – for me. There was a second tray, destined for the husband’s lap, which never got altered.

Until now.

Over at Scrapbook Challenges it was my turn this month to post a technique challenge – so, thought I, the perfect opportunity to finish this two-part tray project!

My technique? Paper weaving. I thought about repeating the sunburst effect on his tray, but since good old checkers are really his thing, the paper weaving idea fit much better:

he loves the black and white

It's not finished - I need to add his name, laminate it and varnish the frame, so I'll post a nice picture when I've done all that.

But I liked it so much I did some more on a birthday card for our friend:

the birthday boy's gonna so totally, like, flip over this

If you want to see in-progress pictures of me weaving paper, get onto the Scrapbook Challenges forum!

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In other news, the Gauche Alchemy mamas challenged me in December to make a video showing how to make a scrapbook layout with their mixed media products - for anyone who is stuck in mixed media canvas mode but wants to switch to layout mode and doesn't know where to start. Now, I want to add a little disclaimer here for the video quality: December was a tough month for me – it seems that I ate everything in my path, including all the hours in all the days, and I just couldn’t get to doing anything as properly as I wanted to. This project included. But to go with this GA blog post, here is the video nonetheless – and a promise that next month’s will be altogether more… together!

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Finally, my trusty assistant, DJ the Dog, helped me pick out two winners for the SC blog hop RAKs here on AndHandmadeToo:

Winners, PM me your addresses – there’s a long-awaited trip to the post office I have to make anyway, so I may as well send all the packages in one go!

Our Brilliant Stars

When we were planning our wedding, we knew from an early stage that more than mere observers, we wanted people to be involved in the wedding. So in our intricate detailing of how our day was going to pan out, we included a lot of people, and from those people, we asked for quite a lot of things.

I’m sure it’s fairly normal to ask family members to help out – all of my family decorated the venue for us on the day, my mum made all the cakes the day before, and his close family hosted welcome drinks for guests the night before – and when it comes to the bridesmaids and groomsmen, there are pre-set, etiquette-driven, certain particular tasks that fall into what you would call the ‘normal’, ‘standard’ or ‘to be expected’ category. But what we asked of our bridesmaids and groomsmen went beyond the norm – then again, our whole day did, too.

We assigned certain responsibilities to each of them, such as asking one of the boys in braces to be the music monitor; we got the polka dot princesses to manage the quiz during dinner by collecting and marking the answer sheets; they all ushered the tables into the ceremony room for our own personal ceremony after dinner; and they each invented and asked vows to the bride and groom to make sure we were going to look after each other. They did a lot more besides this – an awful lot. For that we are eternally grateful, and so touched by the distance they went for us.

It’s for this reason I wanted to make this layout a fairly uncomplicated page: to show off the simple fact that we are so thankful for these friends and what they shared with us on our wedding day; they really were superstars. The true meaning of friendship came out on that day and we will not forget the feeling of immense pride and joy at having these people present at our wedding.

It’s another Scrapbook Challenges sketch – up this week on the forum – in fact, I designed this one myself (except Brynn, SC Queen Bee, jazzed it up and made it look all snazzy like that):

it didn't look this good when I handed it in

The double-page version looks like this:

i tried smooshing it all onto one page, but it's better on two

And a rare double-pager from me looked like this:

Scrapbook Challenges sketch #279

Using only Bazzill cardstock and MME Quite Contrary patterned paper, a few snips of Happy Days paper, alphas and journaling cards, some Happy Days and For the Record stickers, AC Thickers and Bitty Grunge stamps from Tim Holtz to get the circles into the layout, I created a panorama of what I hope is love, gratitude, awe, respect and happiness.

they really were superstars!

Thanks, you lot, for helping to make our wedding day so awesome. We will not forget. x x x

Hold On Tight

Well I hope everyone enjoyed the SC Blog Hop - there were certainly a lot of you hopping around and leaving comments! More Scrapbook Challenges today - I have sketch #278 to share with you.

Participating in the weekly sketch challenges can earn you the title of Pick of the Week or even win you a prize. Most importantly, the sketch itself and the layouts made by the DT can go a long way to nudging you out of a creative rut or giving you the confidence to try something new.

If you've been hanging around here for a while, you'll remember my horror story about my wedding hair. I won't go over that again (if only to avoid the pain of recounting it) - at least not entirely. But now I've made a layout about it, it's kind of hard not to retell this aspect of the wedding day.

I think my hair and make-up girl fainted when she heard the driver of the caddy say 'since we're running late, we'll have to take the big roads' - big roads being the inner city ring, which dips up and down and in and out of tunnels, and is two, three and sometimes four lanes wide. She assured me the style would hold (what else could she say?) but I think it was the major disruption to traffic flow caused by the beer festival that saved my curls: after we got off the ring, every road we turned down was blocked, leading us onto progressively smaller and slower roads. Going slower meant less wind, and less wind meant precious moments more of preserving my carefully curled wedding hair.

The photographers followed behind us in the car and sneaked this shot of me and my mum holding on for dear life:

Scrapbook Challenges sketch #278

I used Echo Park's Happy Days collection primarily for this layout, but you'll find some Crate (Restoration), Lily Bee (This & That), Melody Ross and American Crafts in there as well.

love that AC ribbon

This is the sketch - create to your heart's content and upload to the SC gallery - but always remember to hold on to your hair!

Scrapbook Challenges Sketch 273

It's been a long time since a Scrapbook Challenges sketch came about. The transition from Ning to SC's own site has been a priority though, and well worth it.

The sketches are back now, and number 273 has produced some brilliant interpretations from the DT. The sketch:

Scrapbook Challenges Sketch #273

My interpretation is... well, autumnal (just coming out of summer). That's the mood and season I was in when I made it - and that's how long it's been since an SC sketch! So nothing very Christmassy here, but inspiration nonetheless, I hope:

a rare photo of my dad

I used a rare photo of my dad from Father's Day this year - he's holding a chocolate orange (his favourite) cupcake that I made for him (and that I have to admit were even too sickly for me).  I used a lot of different brands on this page - Websters', Cosmo, Lily Bee, Basic Grey, Crate, Sass - because I wanted to get that brightness of colours going.

still loving those circles

Here, I punched a circle in the base layer and adhered some patterned paper to the other side to show through the window.

OK - over to you! Go to Scrapbook Challenges, sign up if you're not already a member, and find the inspiration!

Our Own Little Christmas

Although Christmas is supposed to be a family time - and I'm not complaining about that - we've had scant opportunity to explore other options over the years. As we've both lived away from home since we were 18, each Christmas was taken up with visiting sets of parents - separately, at first, and then together (meaning we have to operate on an every-other-year basis).

In 2009, when we moved to Brussels, it was the Belgian parents' turn to have us. But because of one thing and another, in particular horrible snowstorms, we ended up waking up in our own house on Christmas Day. It was perfect - we had smoked salmon and scrambled eggs, a glass of Bucks Fizz, and a few presents in our dressing gowns before having to pack up into the car and trek down the empty highway to the family dinner. But we didn't have any real decorations - we'd just moved in in October - save the home-made wooden heart garland that my parents had lovingly put together.

toadstools can be christmassy too!

Last year being the English parents' turn, we didn't bother with decorations at all. But this year, we are here, newly married, at home, much more settled - and we have just put up our tree. It's there in the corner, twinkling and smelling all christmassy, and it embodies a lot about our own little Christmas - we've made the place all festive, we are now husband and wife, we will work all the way up until the 23rd and then have a cosy Christmas Eve, and wake up on Christmas Day in our own place, with our own tree, and we will be here to enjoy its beauty.

So, you wanna see it?

{heart cushion from Ikea}

Punky Scraps only have one challenge this month, because they know how busy we are all going to be with the last-minute shopping. It's a sketch - an incredible sketch:

# 36 from Nat. WOW!

I felt very christmassy when I was thinking about what to do with this sketch. And so, my first Christmas layout (yep - ever!):

I have s.e.i. and their Winter Song patterned paper to thank here

I used mostly ancient stuff - bling, alphas, epoxy stickers, sequin shapes felt flowers - but also some Emma's Shoppe accents and a lot of stamping and painting and misting.

sideways close-up

Here's to the next few weeks and a happy, exciting build-up to Christmas 2011 - our first as a married couple.

Why not play along? It's a beauty of a sketch. Head over to Punky Scraps for some more inspiration from the DT - it's not all christmassy, if that's not your thing!

Just for Me

It seems like I've been doing an awful lot of tasks for DTs lately, and not a lot just for the sake of scrapping. It's not that DT tasks are tiresome or unwanted; it's just that in moments of high motivation and creativity I feel the need to just...well, create.

stretching the Sass to the max

 So I started from scratch, drew a sketch, and made a layout just for me.

the engagement shoot photos finally get an airing

It's a whole fun, eclectic mess of bits and pieces and ideas, and I love it. The good news is, this period of high creativity hasn't stopped yet. I've got another layout up my sleeve waiting for a break in the clouds so it can be photographed, and one on paper and in my head that will probably come into fruition later today. Anyone else feeling super motivated at the moment? 

Punky Recipe - the Star of the Show

It's time for another Punky Scraps challenge! Don't try to resist, because this one is too good to miss.

Make a page from the following ingredients:

• Stars
• No patterned paper
• Masking
• Staples
• Exposed cardboard
• Book page
• Bottle cap
• Washi tape

Credits can only go to Inkadinkado and Tim Holtz for the star stamps

Not using any patterned paper was the biggest challenge for me - the biggest to date. (At least I know the need to use patterned paper will prevent my stash from ever getting out of control.)

I used everything on the list EXCEPT for the bottle cap because I FORGOT it. I had a Newcastle Brown Ale bottle cap somewhere (it has a star on it - perfect) but I only remembered it after I finished the page.

Love stars? Love ripping up cardboard? Look no further...

Again, as I mentioned in my previous post, I spent a LOT of time thinking about this page. I left it till the very last minute, and then woke up on the last day before deadline with the idea in my head. This time, the ingredients were decided for me; it was the laying out of the page that was taking time to come into focus.

I would LOVE to see people playing along with this challenge especially, so please pop over to Punky Scraps and check out the inspiration from the DT.

It's All About The Journey

I'm loving this artistic journey I'm on, and I'm finding myself fascinated by the twists and turns a journey can take, and how each new avenue leads to change, influence, adaptation and improvement. All those terms are subjective, obviously, but I really mean them in a sense of how happy I am with my creations and the direction they are heading in.

A journey can be so many different things.

This life journey I'm on, for example: I'm married now, and I feel like we can take on the world. We will go places together. 

All this and more fed into this layout as I was making it for this week's Punky Scraps sketch challenge. I wanted to pay homage to life and living, to enjoying and experiencing the journey as we are on it, not just after it's finished.

Don't you love it when you look at something you've made and it makes you happy? I used: Basic Grey Basics and Wander paper and Wander rubons, American Crafts Thickers and Toga Alphas, Sassafras Lass bunting sticker, Heidi Swapp Ghost Alphas, Glitz transparency, Echo Park For the Record journalling card, and Gauche Alchemy goodies (feather, sequins, plastic embroidery grid, map, foot paperclip, WOODGRAIN PUNCHINELLA!) 

how great is that foot paperclip?!

Go check out the sketch and the other DT members' awesomely punky work, and share a tiny slice of their journeys too.