October Counterfeit Kit Challenge member blog hop

Welcome again to my somewhat neglected blog.

Big plans, little follow through!

Anyway, I'm kicking off the hop today so hopefully you'll stick around and check out everyone. The full blog hop list can be found at the end of this post.

It may be a smaller hop this month but with such a wonderful challenge - #1 Jewellery Challenge: Use a piece of your jewellery for inspiration! Tell its story... use its design... and make sure to show us a photo of your inspiration too! - it's sure to be a good one. Make sure you say hello to everyone as you go along.

I was very inspired by the Design Team in the original challenge post and had several ways to go. I have a great wedding ring story, a few beautiful inherited pieces which would have been nice to capture and a slew of costume jewellery with a funny back-story too.

In the end, I decided to go with something less meaty and just make a page using up some of my last scraps from my Stargazer kit (layout #11!) to make a pretty page about one of my beautiful pieces: my Tiffany watch pendant.

It was a pure fluke that the leftover papers in the kit seemed to go with the photo so well (for me anyway!).

This was such a successful kit and I think there's enough in the box for one last layout. I'll have a go at that before the end of LOAD.

Do stop and leave me a comment to let me know you were here before moving on to Valerie (here). Why not share what your favourite piece of jewellery is. Or maybe you're like me and have lots :-)

CKCB    http://www.counterfeitkitchallenge.blogspot.com
Lisa H    http://lisahausmann.blogspot.com
Valerie    http://myrainbowcoalition.blogspot.com/
Lesley    http://ohblogitifyoucantbeatthem.blogspot.co.uk
Bridget    http://sobejoss.blogspot.com
Jemma    http://just-jimjams.blogspot.co.uk

There's a lot of sharing going on!

I've been busy in the background these last weeks with lots of scrapping and kit work but there's not a lot of sharing. Somehow I can manage the scrapping but not the blogging!

But I'm slap bang in the middle of the Scrap Happy members LOAD this month and have been creating every day. *Happy Dance*

I've said it before, but combining daily scrapping with kits, be they purchased or my Counterfeit Kit Challenge kits, is the perfect combination. The grab and create concept works so well for me when creating with a deadline. I've used my Scrapabilly kit (shared a few days ago here and here) for two of the days, finished off my August kits on one day and then used my Stargazer (October) kit for 9 of the days! Only 6 days have been with general stash. It takes away a lot of the decisions which can slow you down and more often than not, I even create the page before going to find photos to match the story I want to tell.

Anyway, cutting a long story short, I have linked up a few of my CKC pages through the CKC Flickr group (here) but I thought I'd do a couple of sharing posts here on my blog - I really want to show off my October Stargazer kit which has produced 10 pages already and is definitely up there in my top three kits - evah!

LOAD Day4 - inspired by 1920s American Industrial Design (typewriter)

 

 

LOAD Day5

I adore this paper and definitely need to track down another piece as a single rather than in a paper pack. Gorgeous.

LOAD Day8 - inspired by letter/message to someone

I did two versions of this layout amending the letter under the vellum to a silver pen rather than a harsher black pen. I love using vellum to give a glimpse into what is behind but still keeping things private

LOAD Day12

There have been a few additions to this kit along the way - some gorgeous gold glitter paper, some gold thread and cardstock and then from page to page, I've added in a few little embellies. No rules, right? :-)

What have you been scrapping recently?

Scrapabilly shares #2

If you dropped by yesterday, you'll know that I'm sharing creations with the Scrapabilly October kit full to the brim with Kaisercraft products.

Today, I'm back to show you the next two layouts I made.

I described how I didn't only make autumnal layouts although the kit gives you that feeling when you first look at it. But I discovered that there was so much more to be found in the kit items and made two autumn pages and two completely off-theme.

This first page was for the first day of LOAD1013 which is dedicated to one of our Scrap Happy sisters who sadly died earlier this summer. A hard loss for us all, and day 1 was to be inspired by her. I decided to go with the idea of a message to my niece. Doilies made a pretty contrast to the more graphic designs of the papers and a few pink letters added another dimension.

I "painted" the tag with gold mist. You can't see it so well here but there is a lovely shimmer to it IRL. Gold ribbon just added to the shimmer. (even though the use if this small piece of ribbon isn't going to make much of a dent in my HUGE ribbon collection, even if I've thrown half of it out recently)

My sister's pet name for my niece is Little Bird so I thought this veneer was the perfect addition.

And here is the 2nd autumn layout I made. These photos are a few years old and is one of the most amazing trees I've ever seen. I used to "visit" it every week when I was teaching in Oberhausen and would marvel at its beauty while my students hardly ever even noticed it. These photos really are just one week apart. I would wait excitedly until the leaves started to turn until the whole tree with all those thousands and thousands of leaves changed colour to the most incredible red. And then, whoosh, they all fell to the floor. It was one of the last trees to lose its leaves in November and then the same would happen in reverse in spring. Incredibly beautiful and some photos I've wanted to scrap for some time. Happy to see them showcased here.

There is a whole lot of papers and elements in the kit and if I get to make up another layout, I'll be sure to share again.

In the meantime, if you are in Europe and shop online, do make sure you check out the Scrapabilly shop. Every week there is a fabulous offer on one of the manufacturers stocked - right now, 20% off DCWV. Worth a visit and the ever delightful Sylvia has so much gorgeous stock - I'm so happy to have found her and my stash has exploded with beautiful papers and embellies over the last couple of months!

Scrapabilly Scrapping

I'm late sharing. No excuses, just late!

This month's Scrapabilly kit is still available on the site (here) and is full of lovely autumnal colours and designs from Kaisercraft but versatile enough to make non autumn kits as you will see from my creations and those of the other design team members (make sure you take the time to check out the gallery here)

There's that word again, versatile. I think I've used it every month so far when describing these kits that Sylvia puts together. When I first look at them, I always have a strong feeling about what the kit is all about. Then as I start to use it, I find that there's so much more in it. Yes, I add a few bits and pieces in there such as small embellies, alphas or the odd sheet of neutral cardstock but really, not that much. And the kit ends up creating pages that are so much more than just one theme.

And I love that.

So, I've made four layouts so far and here are the first two and I'll share the next two tomorrow.

This was the first layout I made which was inspired by the coffee stain printed on that gorgeous spotted paper (might have to get another sheet of that!) and also a Two Peas Garden Girls layout by Corrie Jones (here). I just used the bottom of a cup dipped into mist to form the rings and love the look.

This layout highlights my terrible habit of NEVER finishing a cup of tea. I only ever seem to drink 1/3 to 1/2 the cup. And recently I've noticed this is now moving on to all other drinks I have. I don't leave so much, but the cup or glass is rarely empty! It's really a bad habit.

This is the first of two autumn layouts that I made with the kit and also for LOAD1013 that I'm currently in the middle of. The prompt was about stitching and in my wisdom, I decided that I should hand-stitch the grid. What a mistake - it took me hours! I ran out of embroidery thread, didn't have the right colours, got wonky lines! You name it, it happened. But the end result was worth it and I really like the result even though I ended up tweaking it a little the next day to what you see here. I scraplifted myself (here) but ended up filling all the squares with something.

Just a few photos of the amazing leaves we saw in Nova Scotia. Wonderful days.

The colours and designs of the papers are so pretty and small enough to really go down in size of the paper blocks while not losing the details. They'd also be great for cards which I will be doing with the scraps.

So come back tomorrow and see the next two pages from my kit and please share one of your own bad habits! Make me feel better about mine....

Counterfeit Kit Challenge October kit reveal blog hop

Phew, it's October. Which in my book means it's nearly Christmas! Where did the year go?

But you're not here to hear me going on about time and Christmas. I'm hoping you're here to catch up on the latest Counterfeit Kit Challenge inspiration.

If you've arrived here from the first slice of my Lesley/Leslie sandwich, the ever delightful Lesley G's blog (here) you're on the right track. But if you've landed here directly, you might want to pop back to the Counterfeit Kit Challenge blog (here) so you don't miss anything along the way.

This month, we are happy to welcome Stacy as GD so please drop by and say hello!

This month we were given a whole array if choices to counterfeit in the form of September's Cocoa Daisy kits (you can see them all here). There's the main kit, the PL kit and all sorts of extras and add ons which made for a bit of head scratching to decide which direction to take.

In the end, I went with the "5th & Main" kit as I liked the colours and the different feel of it in comparison to the kits I've made recently. The dark blues and contrasting pops of pink and the elements of gold really appealed.

This kit also reminded me of a recent Glitter Girl video and layout where she featured navy, aqua/turquoise and gold (see here). And these two inspirations combined to give me the direction I decided to take with my kit.

Ever the one to jump on the latest trend bandwagon, I've been snaffling a few bits and pieces of gold into my stash for the last month or so and this kit was a great excuse for me to get some of them out and combine them with the blue tones showcased so well by Glitter Girl.

In a nod to the original kit, I also added in some pinks (what a surprise) which I think really lift the whole kit. Of course, all the papers are double sided and therefore, the combinations available from this simple colour scheme is really wide. Love that.

While I was looking through my stash looking for the darker blues, I came across a few items that also tie in with another Glitter Girl highlight (here and here) and current trend, stars. Into my kit these went too.

And so my Stargazer kit came into being. And I love it!

Recently, I've stopped putting cardstock in my kit as I tend to reach for white, cream or kraft and the colours I put into my kits are left over at the end. Seems a bit pointless to include them but you never know, I might come back to card sometime in the future.

So, the starting point was paper and knowing I didn't have any of the original kit papers, I just pulled out some blues and the aqua I had decided on and then a few geometric designs and some soft pinks. Then I found the constellation papers and that inspired me to print out the Two Peas star printables I had purchased in June and add them in as well. Papers done. But the inspiration kit also had some vellum so I added in a few sheets - a SC chevron printed one, one with stars, a yellow that doubles up quite well as a gold and a sheet that I sprayed with gold mist using a polka dot mask. Cute.

The design on the vellum doesn't show up so well in the photo but there is the polka dot, the chevron, the stars and the plain gold/yellow.

Onto the fun bit of adding in alphas and embellies and to be honest, I think I'll be adding in more throughout the month as when I look at the photo, there doesn't seem to be so much. Ha ha!

Three different alphas to give variety, a few washi tapes, some Mr Huey mists (gold, navy and aqua), some gold doilies, enamels, Tim Holtz film strip, some flowers, a set of stamps (something I hardly ever use) and a handful of mini gold sequins.

That may be a lot for some of you but with all the stuff I throw on my pages, it's really not so much LOL.

Anyway, I love the outcome.

I have yet to break into my September kit so I'm hoping to do better with this kit and get going on it straight away!

The next stop today is Counterfeiter Extraordinaire, Leslie S, who just happens to also be the top layer of my Lesley/Leslie sandwich!

And here is the full list of hoppers today in case you get lost.

Guest Designer: Stacy: http://stacy.typepad.com/stacys_paper_crafts/

Angela:  http://colestoucan.blogspot.co.uk/

Dawn:  http://dawnsscrapbookcottage.blogspot.com

Jemma:  http://just-jimjams.blogspot.com/

Julene:  http://julenebydesign.blogspot.com.au

Lesley G.:  http://ohblogitifyoucantbeatthem.blogspot.co.uk

Lisa H.:  http://lisahausmann.blogspot.com/ You are here

Leslie:  http://lcsmithsaved-outofthemire.blogspot.com Go here next

Lynnette:  http://sassyscrapper2010.blogspot.com/

Millisa:  http://millermall.blogspot.com/

Stephanie:  http://skylinepaperie.blogspot.ca

I love to get comments so let me know you were here and tell me if you are also a fan of the latest gold trend?