Wrap up for Country Cousins

The June mega kit, Country Cousins, has been providing inspiration throughout the summer and now still, into fall. Last weekend, I took it to a retreat and blew through it, decimating its contents. On Wednesday, at Scrapbook Club, I used some that last snips to make counterfeit Project Life cards. At first I tried to keep track of which of the two kits, the layout came from. Either Sam and Mel, or Heather and Gwen. But then when the four kits started to play together, I couldn't tell them apart so for convenience they were all filed together.

Started with a busy layout, all layered up just like my dear subject in the photo.

Used some low quality pics off facebook. Turned the fuzzy one to b&w and layered vellum over it to distract from the pixelation.

It was a special Mom's day. We were all together (surprisingly rare considering the close proximity we are to each other) and 2013 brought around my mother's 80th birthday.

I hope that my scrapbooking can evolve to being less event oriented and more subject motivated.

Oops, not done. Need some journaling to tell the story here.

Do you scrapbook special cards too? My problem is that they are all special to me.

Rebecca and Cohen shared their birthday party.

Because the kit was around for several months, and because I printed lots of pictures on Mother's Day right after our dinner. I kind of lost track of what I had scrapped and have several similar layouts. Oh well, I really enjoyed making them.

This lo was for Whimsical Musings 100 celebration.

Probably go back to this one and fill it up. Too much "white space" for me to feel comfortable with it. Or maybe I can convince myself it's a "zen thing" and call it done.

Very happy with Garden Girl. The journaling is about how when Rebecca saw these photos a couple of months after they were taken, she declared "I want to do it again!"

 It was a banner day when we brought home our new acquisition. A '56 Chevy.

Lady Lucy had her first spa day experience. I took apart and used the flower that they had pinned to her collar. 

A simple, quick layout. No dimension. No array of products or techniques. Just photos, paper, a strip of ribbon and adhesive. 

Really enjoyed making this one. Photo taken of the view just outside my kitchen window.

Cropped down 4x6 photos to 3x3. Note to self, try this more often.

The last day of the weekend retreat, I took inspiration from Lisa H and a single photo layout with lots of layers of paper. Using assembly line techniques, I laid out four pieces of cardstock that were left in the kits. Chose a photo for each one. Then sorted all the off cuts to each photo/cardstock combo that it best supported. Next, keeping half an eye on a sketch I had made of Lisa's work I assembled four layouts in about five hours.

Then I finished off the bits with a small stack of  journal cards.

And thus I concluded the mega (four-in-one) kit, Country Cousins to be completed and kissed it goodbye.  Just two full sheets and two half sheets of pp remained to return to the stash. Normally I would have pushed through to the end, bringing in more paper and items from stash to keep the mojo moving, but I was eager to finish this kit and get ready for the next Counterfeit Kit Challenge, which starts today, so I will see you again soon with a new kit reveal. That was quite a long sentence, so you need to read it really fast, just like I would say it, all in one breath.


Thanks for dropping by. Double thanks for comments.

Wrap up for "Mother May I?"

Sometime during the month of May, I seem to have fallen off the scrappy wagon. It was no surprise that the fine summer kept me outside, trimming trees and picking posies. But even, when I was inside, the paper muse just didn't seem to call me to the studio to putter and play.

I still enjoyed making my monthly Counterfeit Kit Challenge. But by July, I had five kits built and on the go. With no layouts coming from them, I called a moratorium on kit building. When the kits are used up or dismantled, I promised myself, (and my CKC friends) that I could again, indulge in the guiltless pleasure of shopping my stash to build a new kit.Today, I am a step closer to joining in the fun again. Today, I finished using my May Counterfeit Kit, "Mother May I?"

(cheers! whistles!! high fives all around!!!)


The kit started as such:

Details here

I put it all in a box with pair of scissors, and a tape runner. Shook it vigorously, and poured out these:

The background for the final one was made by cutting one inch strips and covering a 12x12 sheet in a seemingly random order. When DH saw it, his first comment was that the layers of paper are referencing to the layers in the lasagna. Uh-huh! That's what I was going for. That, and next to no bits to add to the scraps box.

What is your best scrap busting tip? Please share. I have four more kits to work through, and I could use your ideas.

Hop along with me.

Welcome to the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Members Blog Hop. 

You should be arriving from Lesley at  http://ohblogitifyoucantbeatthem.blogspot.co.uk

If not, you may want to go to Counterfeit Kit Challenge and start at the beginning.  http://www.counterfeitkitchallenge.blogspot.com/

The challenge was to pick a project that is either not finished or something that you always intended to start and FINISH IT!

I began with the goal of finishing my daughter’s wedding album. A daunting task, for certain. Usually I work in non-chronological order, creating a layout or two with whatever photos or papers are calling to me at the moment. Might be a current event or one from three or four years ago.  And my style may change from one day to the next so that the layouts in most my albums do not relate to each other. They are each one, a unique individual canvas or short story.

 

Wedding albums, by their nature of being one (major) event with lots and lots of photos, have the inherent requirement of some sort of coordination amongst the pages. They require forethought and planning. And God forbid that you find a couple of new photographs after you have it all organized. (cough…cough)

The easy part of this album is that it is not the main, showcase for the event. My daughter has completed her story already in two albums. With two hundred pages of photos and journaling, the day has been well documented. So then why am I making this album? Well, for several reasons. I made one for her sister’s wedding, so I feel somewhat obligated to give fair time. Those two beautiful albums she made reside at her home, not mine. And because there was a large stack of photos, duplicates and out takes that didn’t make it into her albums. Always inspired to work with what I have, my personal challenge was to create a story book that doesn’t look like it was made from left overs.  

Now for confession time. I did not complete the project as called for by the challenge. The album is not yet ready to be put on the shelf and viewed by visitors. It is, however much, much further along than it was at the start of the month. I can lay claim that I have finished some of the steps towards completion.

The pages were all designed using the power layout system. This approach uses your time effectively and your paper efficiently. It produces albums in a clean, classic design. The secret to power layout is its assembly line process and standardized measurements. This results in a reduced number of design decisions. Seconds are saved at every point which can add up to hours saved at the completion of an album. 

Once the photos and papers were chosen and cut for each page, they were then glued down. Next step, I assembled the album. Then I began adding titles, and embellishments. As I am treating this as a photo book, there will not be much, if any, journaling in it. At the moment, more than half the pages are sporting pretty bits, charming titles and poignant prose.  So while the album is not fully complete, most of it is ready for its page protectors. And I take comfort in the knowledge that every small decision made on each page takes me a step closer to the final, finished production.

Maybe you would like to have a peek at it?  

 

78 pages

Cover page

Example of the results of the Power Layout System

Cute little clusters

 The November wedding had an autumnal colour scheme. I used Creative Memories Divine power pallet and incorporated lots of different stickers, rub-ons, and bling that had found their way into my wedding stash. Using the paper line gave continuity to the pages while the eclectic clusters gives personality to each layout without ending up  with a matchy-matchy feel.

 Fabric leaves that had decorated the carpet in the chapel were saved to be worked into clusters, either featured whole as in the example above or cut to fit in layers, as in the example below.

 There were some duplicates of colour photos that offered the opportunity for dimension by  fussy cutting one and layering it over the other.

 Confession time again. One page has not been designed. Need to secure an enlargement of the bride entering the chapel.

 Now here's a lovely cluster that contains no less than six different manufacturer's product.

 I also pulled out my cuttlebug and put it to good use. Here the wings were made from a scrap strip and Tim Holtz embossing folder.

 Throughout the album I used these Creative Memories Wedding Accents, Paper Titles and Frames. No idea how old they are but they probably belong in a paper trend museum. I put the frames through the cuttlebug to give them the swiss dot effect and left the titles, smooth.

The happy couple

The happy family

One more cute little cluster

Next we will be going to visit Lynette at    http://sassyscrapper2010.blogspot.com

Thanks for stopping by. Double thanks for comments.

One Hundred Novels to Read on the Wall

What an interesting number "one hundred" is. It behooves us to stop and take notice, celebrate, reminisce. It can be about birthdays, centennial of a town, or a collection of pennies (which have been disappearing from daily commerce) or the reaching of the 100th prompt, as it is with Whimsical Musings blog.

It is a first for me, and totally flattering, that I was asked to be their guest designer for today. This is my layout for the occasion:

I wanted to make another layout for display here, on Muddle Puddle, but the week totally got away on me. I woke up at 3:00 AM and realized it was Friday and I am supposed to have my blog ready. ooops.

The topic I will turn into a layout, will be about the BBC's  top 100 books to read. You can find sightly differing versions on google, I am not sure which is the official list but anyone of them is an ambitious challenge. Whenever my thoughts turn to how I might document this list, I start singing in my head (to the tune of "99 bottle of beer on the wall") "100 novels to read on the wall, 100 novels to read!"

Blue means finished. Green is significantly started.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zifon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams -
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factoy - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I have a long way to go on this check list. Maybe if I considered movies and operas I have seen, the list would be a little more colourful.

So, how many have you read?

http://www.homejelly.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Brick-books-on-a-blue-staircase.jpg

Thanks for stopping by. Double thanks for comments.

Community First CKC July

A little late for starting my Counterfeit Kit Challenge this month, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity. This month's kit from Scrapbook and Cards Today, is their Summer Fun Kit.  The colour combo is exactly what I need to tell a special story for which I have printed way too many photos, and have struggled with design ideas due to the bold colours. Red, yellow and black and the grand opening of our new (new then, is it three years already?) grocery store. Buy Low Foods is a pillar in our community and I have a lot to say on the pages that will come from this kit.

The kit to copy

Starting with the papers. The cardstock is all from Close to My Heart. I winnowed it out of some kits that are sitting on the shelf. In fact, a lot of this kit is from CTMH. My stash was treated to a shopping blitz earlier this year, and it is time to start working all the lovely bits into the regular arsenal.

While I dithered as to whether or not to build this kit, (I have four on the go, as it is) I discovered that I actually had one of the exact pieces of patterned paper as featured in the kit. This is the first time that has happened for me, since I started playing with CKC, last July. I took it as a sign to move ahead.

The papers in my kit are:
Junkitz, School Days Paperz, Arrows
Creative Memories, Seasons
Moxie, Make the Grade, School Stripe
K&Company, from a boys stack that I have dismantled and discarded the cover.
Moxie, Make the Grade, School Dot, partial sheet
Creative Memories, Black and White
American Crafts, Play, Jigsaw Puzzle
Red with small star, Ebay stash, manufacturer unknown (muk)
Blue with floral, Ebay stash, muk
The Ebay stash is from my early days of scrapping when I bought a very large amount of paper off of Ebay. Some of it I liked so much, I ordered it again. It will be a long while until I no longer look at a sheet and think to myself "Oh yes, that one is from the beginning."
And the star item in this months kit is.....
American Crafts, Dear Lizzy, Lucky Charm, Starlight.
It has only been in my stash since May when I went shopping with the express intent to find some dark blue patterned paper as I really didn't have any on hand.
I suppose this kind of points out why I don't ever seem to have any papers that are featured in the inspiration kits. The kits are current. My stash is not. Shopping the 5 for $1 box in the back of the store doesn't help in this respect either, but I figure, next month (or season) all the full price items on the shelf that are left will be in the clearance section. The way I hoard paper, it makes little sense to shop full price, new lines. They all turn old(er) in my drawers, anyways.

Then I went on to the alphas and embellies. This month I just grabbed items that appealed rather than trying to match to the kit. It made the process a little faster.

 CTMH, For Always Assortment, pins and buttons.
sei, Pearl and Rhinestone Brads.
CTMH, Journaling Spots.
CTMH, Foret paper flowers.
CTMH, washi tape, slate.
four laminate samples from building supply store.
Tim Holtz tickets.
CTMH, acrylic stamps, Picture Perfect.
tlc, Chips, Titles.

 Studio Calico, die cuts.
Magnetic fridge poetry words, muk.
CTMH gingham ribbon.
Polkadot bias tape, bulk roll at sewing supply store.
yellow bakers twine, from esty, muk.

 American Crafts, Flair Badges, Delish.
CTMH, Harvest Charms, Antique Copper.
CTMH, Color Ready, Kraft Borders.
CTMH Stickease , Lucky.
Autumn Leaves, Stencils, J-Q and R-Z, going to cut off the words from these as haven't used them as stencils yet, in the 5 or more years that they have been in my hands.
ColorBok, Woodland, Two sheets of alphas and die cuts from the stack.
Heart boarder strip I made a ways back using CM boarder system.

Then after the photos were taken, I tossed in:
Daisy Bucket Rub-ons. I have a bunch of these in a sealed bag. Will try to use as many as possible. Rub-ons have a shelf life that make them a bad choice for hoarding.
Creative Memories Enchanted, ABC stickers. They are red so they help resemble the original kit.




So the lot of it looks like so:

Community First

And I have some very exciting news. This weekend, Mr. Muddle, myself and two of my scrapping besties are going away for the weekend to scrap and practice yoga and a retreat entitled "Scrapoga" Nothing beats dragging a car load of cases and boxes to a different location to get you reacquainted with what you really need to scrap. And what you really need is usually something you left behind. But with a dozen or more avid crafters on board, someone is sure to have a purple passion ink pad, or baby brad in chartreuse that you can use to complete that perfect layout.

I am looking forward to chronicling some important (to me) stories about our local grocer. It's one of those thing I keep putting off because I don't know exactly how to approach it and I don't want to do a poor job of it. But the time has come to stop deliberating and start telling. It's my job, as a scrapper, to get the story down, because if I don't, no one else will. Wish me well as I tell the story (from my perspective) of our grocer,  Buy Low Foods, and their commitment to our community.

Thanks for dropping around. Double thanks for comments.