Have stash, will kit

October is well and truly here and with it comes a new Counterfeit Kit Challenge kit which is extra exciting this month as I start my time with them as part of their design team - I'm officially a Master Forger!

This month's inspiration kit/s are September/October 2010 kits from Little Red Scrapbook (you can see the kits here).

There's a simply stunning, pretty kit which jumped right out at me and shouted "Make me!" and we were also given a wonderfully cute Halloween themed kit which I couldn't resist either.

So I made two kits... it's not as if I don't have enough stuff to put in them after all!

I selected a whole selection of soft colours and papers for my first kit which I have named "Fall in Love" which is of course a play on words because, as you all know, I LOVE autumn. 

I like the fact that this autumn kit isn't full of those browns and yellows because I use those all the time anyway. I added in a lot more embellishments and alphas than the original kit, but you knew that I would, didn't you? This might be a challenging kit to make any masculine layouts from, but I feel I'm up to that challenge and it's great to see some golden oldies in here from my seemingly never ending BG collection!

And then I made up a smaller kit of Halloween stash inspired by the selection of items in the original kit. I decided to put in my Cosmo papers, mixed in with some BG alphas and a lot of themed embellishments. Halloween isn't such a big celebration round here but we do get dressed up and have some fun, so there are layouts to be done each year. I figured, if I had a kit ready to go and the incentive of using it up for the Counterfeit challenges, I might get a few old photos down on pages. I have included a lot of felt scraps, inspired by the cutest banner in the inspiration kit. I'm definitely going to be making that to use!

I decided to give it a German name, "Schrecklich" which means "ghastly" but somehow sounds much cooler!

This month's sponsor over at CKC is Momenta. You can see their products here, their YouTube channel here, and their great blog here.

In order to be eligible for their prize package for this month, all you need to do is:

1. LIKE them on their facebook page (making sure you comment on their page to let them know that CKC sent you! )
2. Send an email to CKC to let them know that you did this.
3. Send a friend over too. You'll get an extra entry for each friend who also likes their page, comments on it and let's CKC know that YOU sent them!

Don't forget that Counterfeiting is for you whether you are a scrapbooker or a card maker. It's all about shopping your stash, joining in on some fun challenges and making stuff! Isn't that something that we could do all be doing a bit more of?

It would be lovely if you would join us - pop over to CKC and look around, there's a lot going on over there!

A quiet week

This always happens after LOAD.

After manically scrapping every day for a whole month, I suddenly stop. And that usually means a total STOP. No scrapping of any sort for weeks and weeks and weeks!

So this week, I woke up on Monday morning and thought, "Oh, no layout today." And went on to enjoy our day. The same happened on Tuesday and most of Wednesday.

And then I decided to pick up the paper trimmer again and see if I could be creative!

I had a commission for The Scrapbook Magazine to do and spent some time pulling it together. I think it's so pretty, full of a lot of gorgeous product. Of course, I can't share the whole thing with you, but how about a little sneak peek?

Surprisingly for me, this appears to have given my another small kick-start and I've done another two layouts  trying to use up some of the numerous kits I have lying around. My new kit arrived this week and I still have 8 unfinished ones that ought to be used up before I start the new one. Now I know that won't happen but I grabbed one and have done two cute Chance kids layouts. The light is too bad to photograph them but will upload them next week sometime.

The only other exciting thing to happen round here was Halloween last Sunday night. I've written before about how this is something new and unknown here in Germany and we like to celebrate it, but to the "delight" of my Germany family - well, at least I like to believe that it's to their delight :-) !

I won't upload all the photos I took but I have to share a few.

I am especially proud of my very special carved pumpkin. I'm not known for anything fancy and usually just do the standard lopsided face so I decided to step up to the mark and find out on the internet how the fantastic carved pumpkins you see on the internet from USA are done. I downloaded a template and read up on what I should be doing. I didn't have the right tools but I think I managed quite well! I used my paper piercer (scrapbooking to the rescue!) to highlight the shape to cut out and then I scraped off the skin to give the two tone effect. 

Ta laaaa:

We made sure that our communal staircase was Halloweened up and apparently, the orange light shone out into the night and could be seen from far and wide! (I think all our neighbours think we are ever so slightly mad!)

The mantlepiece looked just as lovely as I had hoped and the atmosphere was wonderful with all the candles and the eerie pumpkins peeking through the window.

And me? I spent a bit of time on my costume and made myself into Frankenstein's Monster's Bride using lots and lots of black tulle which was a lot of fun although a bit of a fire hazard! I got the idea of the makeup on the Martha Stewart website and it was done using the theatrical white makeup we have and a doily. I thought the effect was really interesting!

 

Creating for Halloween

Halloween is not big over here in Germany. They don't really know much about it and only think it's something commercial imported from USA to get kids to spend money they don't need to - I'm trying to educate them about this!

But I have introduced it to my German family and what is really good here is that November 1st is All Saints' Day which is a Bank Holiday and therefore, always a day off. And that means that we can do something every year on the actual day, and not worry about getting up for work the next day.

For years, we kept it very low key with just a family dinner, but we have been building up the spookiness and the decoration and the whole look and now it's become a tradition that the Hausmanns will host a Halloween dinner and everyone should come along - in a costume! They do so well, and humour me in my attempt to bring a little bit of home over here. ** Actually, I think they probably only come along for a piece of delicious pumpkin pie but at least they come!

I have been building up my decorations recently and last year I made this banner (here) and this wreath (here) that I have talked about before, as well as this banner (here) from early Bellaboo days. But this year, I really wanted to go a bit further and use up some more of the bits and pieces that I have collected as well as some of the papers that are filling my Halloween drawer but are rarely used on a layout. I mean, how many layouts can I make about a single evening, once a year!?!

And I decided that my poor under-used Cricut needed some attention and an idea for a simple banner came to be. Serious inking, glitter and Stickles add to the mix:

** Sorry that the photos are not so good but it's a loooong banner and I struggled to get a good shot - and difficult light these days.

And I had a leftover wreath that was just crying out to be used up and I had an idea to use black feathers and make some felt roses. These roses were just so fun to use and I love the effect - I added in some Stickles and glittered up those horrible spiders and the bat:

I painted some candles for my large candelabra and added some black feathers and lots of spider webs:

And last but not least, I decided that my mantlepiece was screaming out to be Halloweened up so I got some black candles for here too, added some candy eyes (they taste as disgusting as they look apparantly!) in a glass and glittered up some decorative pumpkins and a potted spider, mixing these in with mini real pumpkins which are all the rage over here:

** Couldn't resist taking a flash photo here to get the sparkle showing! Soooo pretty!!!

And costumes? This year, we are trying to create a Frankenstien's monster and a ghostly "bride" (we'll see how we get on - costumes are always thrown together in a matter of minutes, shortly before everyone arrives!)

I hate to think what the neighbours think of me - several of these items are outside the flat door - in the communal stairway and they must think I'm mad!!!

100 sheets!

Quite some time ago - back at the beginning of September - I decided to join S on her "School of Scrap" challenge which translated for me as "Cut into 100 sheets of patterned paper". I decided to include any 12x12 sheets of journalling cards but not to include any sheet of paper that had already been cut into - even if it was only half an inch. S added any sheets that came into her studio via kits back into her numbers but I decided that would be too demotivating for me!

Last night, my number went over 100! Yoo hoo! Go me! S's incentive for herself was that after 100 sheets, she could go shopping again but I just wanted to see how quickly this would happen for me. Of course, doing LOAD has helped (didn't date my usage but let's face it - every day, new sheets have been cut into!) and so has my goal of using up my Scrapagogo kits as well as joining Deb on her Create Free mini book. But 100 sheets is 100 sheets... if I could just get them totally used up now!

I kept a list of what I have used and it gives a few clues about where my scrapping loyalties lie:

BasicGrey - 39 sheets from 9 different collections
Cosmo Cricket - 24 sheets from 6 different collections
My Mind's Eye - 8 sheets
Crate Paper - 8 sheets (but all included in the Scrapagogo kits - I don't buy much of this myself)

And I can also see that I have used up (or at least cut into)14 sheets of Christmas paper (I have whole collections which are untouched) and just yesterday, started attacking my Halloween papers (only one of which is counted as this was #100) and in total, made inroads into papers from 16 different manufacturers and 35 different collections. Makes you giddy just thinking about it all!

 So, BG it is for me then!!!

Ok, so enough of the numbers - the main thing is that it's day 25 and I am still in on the daily layout (LOAD) and my pile of layouts this month is looking good!

I'll post some more layouts soon but in the meantime, I will leave you with this sneak peek of what I have been up to as well recently.