More counterfeit layouts...

My counterfeit kit is getting lots of use and I'm loving the challenge of using it for totally different styles of layouts and trying to find ways to combine some of the really old products I put into my kit with the newer stuff. Oh, yes, and then there's the challenge of creating titles with alpha sets which are already half depleted :-).

All in all, enough to get the old grey matter churning!

Layout #3 uses up lots of MME scraps, a really old 7Gypsies journalling tag and just two of the hundreds of photos I have from our golfing holiday in the Austrian Alps.

I am still unsure really how to tackle holiday photos. I don't want to produce pages and pages of layouts for each holiday (there goes me making it sound like we have holidays all the time!), so what's to be done? What I tend to do at the moment is just pick out photos that say something particular about the holiday and then move on like that - nothing matching, nothing very coherent and not an awful lot of detail. I'd be interested to know what anyone else does. 

Not a favourite layout, but overall, it's ok.

Another great thing that they offer on the Counterfeit Kit Challenge site is resources for printables and tutorials. I had some time on my hands and checked some of them out. This month's printables were based around bees because the original SC kit had a sweet little bee stamp in it. I liked a couple of the downloads and decided to print out some on transparency to cut out, and a little label type thing on photo paper. 

When I came across these gorgeous photos of sweet Isabella pottering in the garden, the little bees found a happy home!

This layout took me forever as I had the bright idea to do some stitching - wow, that adds hours on, I can tell you! But I wanted to try out making some bee flight lines to add some texture and interest so ploughed through. I really must get my sewing machine repaired - I want to do more sewing. It may have taken ages, but I enjoyed the process and the outcome.

I also followed up on some of the tutorials and was especially interested in the flowers. I love to add flowers to my layouts but even though Prima are gorgeous, they can hit the wallet a bit hard so some home-made flowers could be interesting. I liked the 5 petal flowers I saw on Madmin.com (link to tutorial here) and decided to try them for myself. Of course, I made it difficult by using some rather small squares of hessian which frayed horribly, but overall, I like the results and if I spent a bit more time and effort, I think this technique makes gorgeous flowers. 

Do you have a favourite home-made flower technique to share? 

This may not be a favourite layout, but it uses up scraps of paper, a super old label, one of the millions of paper flowers I have hanging around, some buttons and embellishments, and the background PP is really old - probably 4 years. So all in all, a very resource-full layout.