Happy to be Jingling again!

It's January and Christmas is over so what does that mean? It means that Christmas 2013 is just 50 weeks away and it's time to start making Christmas cards again! Ha ha! No really!

The wonderful Jingle Belles girls are back to challenge and inspire us to get card making all year long so that we have a wonderful pile of Christmas greetings ready to post when the crazy season rolls again - and we all know it will!

For the first prompt of the year they've asked us to show them what Santa left us in our stockings. He didn't bring me anything but I did treat myself to a few new things in the sales and decided it was a perfect time to get cutting. I tracked down an appealing sketch and got going!

Sketch courtesy of Got Sketch?

Just a simple card to kick off the season.

Let the fun begin. ;-)

Sugar sweet hearts

With the change in routine over at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge site, we've also changed the challenges around a bit and I'm here today to share what I've created for the 2nd prompt of the month.

All the challenges are now up earlier in the month to get you inspired to use up your kit so I hope what I'm sharing today will get your creative juices flowing!

We were asked to use cookie cutters either on or for our project. I decided to use a nested set I had forgotten I had as a template for a set of hearts to layer up and set the theme for the layout.

I really enjoyed making this bright coloured page at this gloomy time of the year (January is my least favourite month to be honest) and the hearts drove the way I wanted the layout to feel. The photo is a really recent one which felt good - it was nice to have a non-Christmas photo to use :-)

I have to confess to adding in the heart shaped doily but it was the perfect size and it seemed a shame not to really.

Now, will you create shapes with your cutters for a page? Use them as a stencil to mist a design? Or perhaps get even more crafty and create something inside your shapes - I've seen loads of ideas online but right now, I just wanted to get my hands on some scissors and paper.

A good start to the new crafty year.

Don't forget to share what you make and link up over at the CKC blog (here). And just to remind you that Paper Issues who created the inspiration kit this month (see her Etsy shop here) is not only  sponsoring the CKC this month by offering a $20.00 prize to one lucky Counterfeit linker at the end of the month but also offering a 20% discount to all CKC readers (make sure you check out the original kit post here for more details)

Another great reason, as if you needed one, to play along with us this month. :-)

Counterfeit Kit Challenge January kit reveal blog hop

Welcome to 2013!

Internet image (no original source found - sorry)

I've got my fingers crossed and have high hopes that this will be a good year. I've had a few rough ones recently ;-) so I think I've earned it!

So to all my blog readers, I wish you a most wonderful New Year and all the very best for all your dreams and wishes for the next 12 months.

It's the 1st of the month and this means a new routine round here. The Counterfeit Kit Challenge kit reveal blog hop has now moved to today which means that you get no delay in all that kit inspiration. And we are kicking off the year with a new team full of some familiar faces (that would be me and a few others!) along with some talented new ones. So I really suggest you drop by every single one of us on the hop and check out all that new inspiration. There's a whole lot of scrumptiousness to soak up so don't miss out on any of it and if you've arrived here directly, I suggest you pop back to the Counterfeit blog (here) for the starting point. And if you've already been working through the list and are here via the very talented Libeeti, then don't run off to make your kit already. Stop a while and check out mine and the rest of the team. There's so much to share!

This month, we were given the most gorgeous after Christmas kit to forge - A Merry Winter December kit by Paper Issues over on Etsy. Yummy. I would have bought this kit if I'd seen it!

Such a lot of lovely colours and so many ways to use up the kit without it being ALL Christmas. I was really drawn to the pinks, the reds, the aquas and the sparkle.

I was sad to realise that I didn't have a single one of the Crate Christmas papers (now on my list!) so I had to start from the basics and build up from there.

First let me present my January fresh start 2013 kit, Renew...

As always, cardstock came first. Lots of white and kraft and then just two sheets of coloured card (it's getting harder and harder to use it on layouts these days).

Then I tried to pick out papers which either had the overriding colour, or a design feel of the original but without going the Christmas route. I found that my Echo Park, Everyday Eclectic had just the right amount of colour, geometric designs and playful feel to them for them to be the basis of the papers. Many of them were also double sided which gives such a great extension to the kit and makes it so much more versatile. As always, there's one or two really old ones in there hoping for an appearance on a real live page!

And the fun bit - the embellishments. I tried to match up the types of embellishments from the original, even if they look totally different - so pins, buttons, flowers, flairs, some veneer items, some kraft tags (rather than the banners), some frames that can be misted (rather than chipboard), ribbon, twine, bling mist, alphas and labels. I have a lot more of this stuff in my kit but you know how I love to load up the "pretty stuff"!

This is a perfect pick me up kit for the new year and I'm looking forward to breaking into it and getting going again after what feels like an age without any creating at all. Wish me luck to track down that mojo at the same time.

Here is the complete blog hop list in case you get lost along the way and off you go now down under to visit new forger Lisa J! Funny to have two Lisa's on the team now!! On a side note, I spent all my younger years being Lisa S rather than just Lisa and now I'm Lisa H instead - makes me smile!

You won't want to forget to leave me a comment to let me know you were here. You never know, it might be worth your while! *wink wink*

I'm feeling in a generous mood and would love to share a bit of love with you too. It's the perfect way to start the new year don't you think. :-)

Guest Designer: Madeleine Lopez http://senoritaml.wordpress.com/

Andrea  http://snappingmonsters.blogspot.com/  

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

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

Jennifer  http://www.jennifersjumbles.blogspot.com/  

Julie  http://www.hisglorygirl.blogspot.com/  

Libeeti http://creationswithlove-li-bee-ti.blogspot.com/  

Lisa H. http://lisahausmann.blogspot.com/  ß you are here

Lisa J. http://thesimplelifewithlisa.blogspot.com.au/ ß go here next

Lynnette  http://sassyscrapper2010.blogspot.com/

Milissa http://millermall.blogspot.com/  

Rebecca http://howiburb.blogspot.com/

So here's to a wonderful year full of fun, scrappy inspiration and wonderful counterfeiting friends!

Image found here

Happy kitting everyone.

My Scrapbooking Process

As part two of my contribution to the Counterfeit Kit Challenge countdown to Christmas, I 'm back today to share my scrapbooking process with you (or one of my processes anyway).

We all took this different directions and I decided not to link it up to the page kit I shared with you yesterday, but rather to follow myself as I made a layout and notice the decisions I made and the thought process I went through to come to the end result.

Now this is a LONG post so I have reduced it down a little. But you can find the full post over at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge blog today.

The layout comes from the prompt over at Whimsical Musings to be inspired by babies. 

My starting point was a photo that just shouted out to be scrapped of my new niece. Knowing I wanteded to base my design on white cardstock gave me a good starting point for me to then go to my piles of stash and start picking out anything that spoke to me. Before long I had a half dozen or so sheets of paper or scraps that seemed to go together. I laid them out and added a few embellishments to the pile so I could see what would work together. A few papers got taken out straight away and in the end, I only used a few of those selected.

The next step for me is to lay out some paper blocks to see how the colours are combining and to estimate the layers I want to incorporate. I just cut up blocks of paper and only then work out how and where to put them. I lay out the papers on the page to see them together and then added a few of the embellishments. My process is very fluid! As ideas hit, I just fish out the products from my stash and add them to the pile.

At this point, nothing is attached so I picked everything up and started gluing down, lightly pressing them down until I know that the position is correct. When everything looks about in the right position, I flatten all the items down with my hand to fix them all.

Next up comes the photo and the beginnings of my embellishments, usually placed in small, dimensional clusters, and very often forming some sort of a visual triangle or diagonal across the page. 

It’s now that I start rummaging around in my stash for extra little items to add in to my clusters. 

For this layout I continued to poke around on my desk and discovered some washi tape before I looked through my alphabets for something that would be suitable. I knew I wanted to write a long title but wasn’t sure what or where. When I came across these small BG letters, I knew they would be perfect due to the large number of letters on each of the sheets. I did this title back to front, starting at the bottom with the last word and working back to the beginning of that phrase before deciding how the title should start (wording) and where I would put it. That is another reason I like the current trend for small letters so much: it doesn’t restrict me so much and I can usually find a small corner to squeeze in these words.

One of the issues with creating the page like this is that there’s been no planning for my journaling! However, for this layout, I was lucky as the photo is the main focus, the title is long and says a lot and therefore the journaling was almost not needed. But I don’t make many pages with no journaling at all, so I got out some rough paper and jotted out a few lines until I found something a bit more than, “You are gorgeous and I love you”! Then I copied this into the small corner I’d picked out and was relieved to find it fitted in. 

 The last thing I did was to add some super thin paper strips (as you cut them, they naturally develop a curl) along the side of the photo with a small pink ribbon bow at the bottom that had caught my eye in my scrap bag.

Now it’s time to step back and have a look to see if everything is working ok together. I check for balance, for colours, for crooked letters (although they are always a bit crooked!), for if something else is needed to add a little extra.

So there you have it, a typical page following a typically chaotic process for putting it together. I hope you enjoyed this little insight to my rather disorganised brain. 

Again, there's a bit more detail over at the Counterfeit site if you'd like to read the whole thing.

Now, all that's left is for me to wish you all a very Merry Christmas everyone!

A Counterfeit Kit Challenge mini-kit

If you've been following along this month, you will already know that over at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge blog, we're doing things a bit different and have all created mini-kits for each month of the year.

And if you've been paying attention, you'll also know that we are up to November. So here I am.

I chose November as a few years ago, I decided to change my attitude to this month that has such bad PR. You won't find many people telling you it's their favourite month or even that they love it. But I decided to start to feel more positive about it and that attitude has worked for me - I really do like it a lot more than I used to. You might even say that I love it!

Ok, it can be grey and cold and miserable but so can any month. It makes you appreciate the wonderful blue skies even more when they do appear. And the build up to Christmas starts in November which was my starting point for my mini-kit.

I decided to focus on Traditions. And there are a few I thought of straight away for November which I thought might be good starting points for you to think about.

There's Bonfire Night for those of you in the UK, complete with hot sausages, a roaring fire and fireworks. Then there's Thanksgiving for all of my stateside friends. A huge X on the US calendar for sure.

But how about the traditions in the build up to Christmas, many of which start in November?

• Your family might have the obligatory unveiling of the decorations. 
• You might always put the tree up the last weekend in November. 
• You might wait to start playing Christmas music until the beginning of November (or is that just me?). 
• You might take an evening to write all your Christmas cards. 
• You might be organised enough to get all your presents and then spend an afternoon in front of It's a Wonderful Life and wrap them all up. 
• Here in Germany, the Christmas markets all open up at the end of November and it's tradition to head out and get the first Glühwein of the season. 
• Of course a big one is the first Starbucks Christmas drink in those long awaited red cups
• But the big one that came to mind for me is all about Advent. Lighting the first candle on our Advent Wreath on the first Sunday of Advent. And that is more often than not in November. Of course this year it's 2nd December, but you know what I mean! 

So, with all these November Christmas traditions, I decided to delve into some of my Christmas stash which doesn't actually get used for so many layouts, and create a mini kit I called Anticipate

Page Maps sketch November 2011

The products I've used in my kit are mostly quite old and to be honest, could be used for more than just Christmas which I thought was important for my November kit. I could use it to make layouts about winter, cold days, cosy times or ski-holidays if you take out the Christmas themed stamps. Very versatile. Why not look at your Christmas products to see how else they could be used? It's a shame to just use them for those three or four days of the year. 

the important thing about a mini kit is to really restrict yourself but to make sure the amount of stuff you have in it reflects how much stash you pile up on your background cardstock/paper. If you put too much in, it's just another monthly kit. Too little and it's not enough to motivate me to use it and I will reach for the rest of my stash while creating which defeats the point of a kit. 

I've included two pieces of cardstock as my page kit is really big enough for two. There may therefore be a second layout to come. I've made sure there are large and small letters, a good flurry of embellishments and as a challenge to myself as I buy them and don't use them, some stamps.

But in the meantime, here is my Advent layout for you.

ADVENT LAYOUT HERE

Thanks for joining the Master Forgers this month for a look through a year's worth of inspiration. Please make sure you let me know you were here and share your creations with us over at the Counterfeit site.

Greetings of the Season

If you have come here via the Counterfeit Kit Challenge site, then you will know that I'm here today as part of the Master Forgers' Greetings of the Seasons to all our fellow counterfeiters!

Keeping it short and simple today.

I'd just like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very wonderful Christmas full of love, fun and happiness as well as a smattering of creativity if time allows!

Pinterest inspiration here

And a bilingual Merry Christmas to you all!

Thanks for dropping by and, "Consider yourself hugged" as they say here in Germany :-)

Traditions

It's that time of year when we start thinking traditions, so it is perfect timing for Counterfeit Kit Challenge mini-challenge #3 to be prompting us to record one (or more!) of them on our pages.

I came up with a long list of traditions for summer, Christmas, the build up to Christmas, things like British Guy Fawkes night. But either they needed photos I didn't have or couldn't find, or they were a bit too Christmassy for my Dempster autumn kit that I was determined to use.

So I fished around in my photos for inspiration and came up with a connection I hadn't noticed before and I suddenly realised that this has become a real autumnal tradition for me.

When the leaves start falling, and the temperature starts to drop, I start taking baths. Regularly. Maybe more than regularly! Let's just say that it's not exactly very environmentally friendly to be using up all that water - just for me.

But it's true.

And this is the layout I put together. A tried and trusted design but one that I love so why not use it over and over again?

Sorry for the bad photos. They are all a bit orange.  I need to try and work out a better routine to photograph my layouts now that I hardly ever see daylight!

So, hop on over to the Counterfeit site and join in the challenge of capturing one of your traditions - every family has them, whether they are the same as many others, totally off the wall, or somewhere in between.

It's as if they planned this month just for me!

I know that you know that I love autumn. I tell you all the time. So when I saw the list of challenges for this month at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge, I was happy, happy, happy!

First off we had our favourite stamps and I knew my trusty maple leaf would be the one. Now comes inspiration from autumn photos.

While I was putting my kit together, I knew that I wanted to make some more Yukon layouts and I had photos like this one below in my mind. I knew that I wanted to have sumptuous tree photos included and this was just what I needed.

So for the mini challenge #2 "Be inspired by fall foliage" was a no brainer. This photo jumped out at me and my Engineer Creek layout was born.

Look at those colours, look at the brilliance of that golden hue, look at how unreal these leaves seem to be. That was exactly what we got at Engineer Creek and it was somewhat spectacular! Sunset, when the setting sun hit the top of the trees was all the more amazing. I am still living off those memories!

I think I could do this challenge a dozen times and still not get bored! Why not give it a try?

Don't forget to share your creations with us over at the Counterfeit site (here), we love to see where these prompts take you.

I just made #70!

I made it. I reached my target of at least 60 Christmas cards made. It might be a few days late but it's not too bad. In fact, I just counted up and I managed 70!

I've made a few this week that I can't actually share just yet but here is my take on the latest Jingle Belles prompt #24 "Christmas Feast".

It's the last one of the year and they are inspiring us to include food of some sort on our cards. A nod to this being Thanksgiving time of year as well as all the delicious food that is associated with Christmas.

I was surprised to find that I didn't have any paper with food on it. I expected to find Christmas puddings somewhere on the Figgy Pudding papers but nothing!

So I went with candy from the Eskimo Kisses line, making a little layered banner full of sweets.

Simple and fun and a way to use some of the stickers I knew I wouldn't use on layouts. I sprinkled a liberal amount of sparkly bling just to finish it off and a sweet (pun intended) sentiment.

And there you have it. Card #70!

I spent some time yesterday stamping inners with a mix of English and German sentiments so now I just have to put them all together and get writing! I'm aiming to get them in the post the first week of December (wow, so early!) and I could NEVER have managed that if it weren't for the delightfully, wonderful girls over at Jingle Belles.

This is their last prompt of the year but you can be sure that they will be back in January for the next batch of fun prompts to get us Jingling all year. You really should join in!

Inspired by stamps

I hope I'm not alone when I say that I have a small collection of stamps (I don't consider myself a stamper at all really) but even then, I don't use them very often.

I think that it will take too long to get them out, pick out a colour, fish out the acrylic block, practice the stamping and then risk my whole project by getting the stamping wrong!

But it doesn't have to be that way. And every time I'm challenged or inspired to use my stamps, I remember how much fun it can be.

So the latest Counterfeit Kit Challenge mini challenge is perfect to blow the dust off your favourite stamp and get going!

"Pick ONE stamp (not the whole set) to inspire you and use on your project. You can use more than one stamp, but your inspiration one should be prominent.  You will tell me which stamp it was on your blog and how it inspired you."

With my November kit, Dempster, being such an autumn inspired kit and with my intention to capture some more of my Yukon memories, I went with a tried and tested leaf stamp to guide my design. In fact I saw the end result in my head before I even opened up my stamp drawer and knew exactly how I would use the stamp to make a leafy border.

The leaf is part of a pack of four that I picked up when I was making my monster Nova Scotia album back at the beginning of my scrapbooking adventure.

I didn't know anything about stamping back then and just picked up a set to add some detail to my pages.

In fact, the set has four leaves in it

 ... but the truth is I hardly ever use the others, reaching for the maple every time.

It's a really good quality stamp and the detail is so lovely that it's hard to go wrong with it.

The connection between the leaf, the maple, Canada, my kit and my travels all come together in this page and it turned out pretty close to the picture I had in my mind which is always a surprise and a delight.

"And to think I was worried there wouldn't be enough trees"

I used a whole range of different distress ink colours, stamping the leaf three times in each and then fussy cutting them out to form a layered and scattered border across the centre.

I tucked in a lot of pretty pearls, some funky wooden toadstools and a scatter of buttons to add some more dimension.

And of course the star of the show is the photo. I really was worried that there would be few trees on our travels through the Yukon and NWT but even though they definitely got smaller the further north we travelled, there were more than enough to keep me smiling. I might have more tree photos than anything else in fact!

Glad to have captured another little piece of the puzzle that is our adventure. One day I will bring all these pages together to see how full a story I've told!