One Of My Faves

I hope everyone's been having a good week so far. We've been getting some gorgeous sunshine here which is wonderful.

I thought I'd share one of my all-time favourite layouts with you. It was published in Scrapbooking Memories Vol 15, No 12. Here it is:

To create the background on the top portion, I swiped Dylusions behind the photo. I then dropped a few splats around the swipes (highly technical terms here, lol!) then blew the splats through a straw. I then topped them with a rhinestone.

The bottom section is made entirely from Manor House Creations flowers plus some punched leaves. A strip from one of my favourite paper ranges - American Crafts Sketchbook - sits between the sections. I ran ric rac around the edges of the layout which I think looks fab on the layout but makes it almost impossible to crop on the computer!

Here's a close up:

This pic is a wonderful reminder of the first day Leonie, Beck and I met.

In the same mag I had another very floral layout published although this one is in a very different style.

It's a bit hard to see here but this layout is all about the rather good action shots my son took of me sliding down a waterfall. 

And lastly, the Masters Challenge for that month was for Darkroom Door. We had to create something with the Darkroom Door film strip photos that we could use for organising our scrap room. This certainly made us think outside the square! I store my 12 x 12 papers in a cardboard file box so I came up with the idea to use tags to show what each section contained.

I punched a different border along the bottom of each tag and coloured each tag differently. I punched a hole in the centre of the flowers and used a curtain hook to hang the tags from the side of my storage box.

My Workshop Secrets article this month had lots of examples of what I was explaining but no full layouts so there's nothing more to add here, except to say that for those lucky people who found out today that they will be the Masters next year - congratulations! We won't know who they are a for a few months yet but there will be 10 lucky ladies doing happy dances somewhere today!

Happy scrapping!

Heather

Snowy Secrets

Hi all,

Wow! What a wild week we've had weather-wise. Our local town was in chaos yesterday as power lines came down, buildings were damaged and traffic lights were out due to wild winds lashing the area. There weren't enough police to man all the intersections so motorists and pedestrians were taking their lives into their own hands just trying to cross the road.

The winter weather was on my mind when I put together my Workshop Secretes article for Scrapbooking Memories Magazine, Vol 15, No 11. I wrote about how to use snowflakes on a page. Snowflakes are so versatile - if you regularly use flowers on layouts then you'll have no problem with snowflakes as they work in a very similar way.

My first layout was completely inspired by the whole snowflake/crystal theme and I went with a transparent background onto which I stitched rows of falling snowflakes. I love the effect but it proved very difficult to photograph! To be honest though, I reckon I did a better job than the magazine photographers as they placed it on a white background which ruined the effect completely.

Here's my photo of the layout:

I made a giant snowflake from paper, painted it and decorated it with anything that gave an icy impression. I then added some smaller flakes and attached the lot to my stitched transparency background.

Here's a close-up - this time taken on a flat timbered surface.

My second layout featured my gorgeous niece rugged up against the wild winter in Europe a few years ago. The pic was only a small one sent from her phone but I think that sometimes the impression a photo gives can be more important than it being perfect quality.

Although the layout looks like there are snowflakes falling all over it, only a few of those embellies are actually snowflakes. The rest just give the impression of snowflakes. There are various flowers, liquid pearl dots and swirls, knotted rafia, rhinestones, hearts, fibres and clear pebbles.

Here are some close ups so you can see what I mean:

I tore the page in the top right corner so it looks like the snowflakes are pouring out if there.

I hope you're keeping warm inside and finding some scrapping time!

Cheers,
Heather

Workshop Secrets

Hi there,

I'm so sorry I've been a but quiet on the blogging front lately. I've just been busy! I've had a busy time with work, kids and scrapping and something else had to give! Anyway, I am here to make amends.

I thought It's high time I gave an update on my Workshop Secrets articles in Scrapbooking Memories magazine.

Vol 15, No 6
This subject was about using old papers as I felt this is an issue we all have to deal with. Since I wrote that article I haven't thrown out any old papers as I keep using them for backgrounds and in the ways I discussed in my article. Here's my favourite layout from that article.

I used mists over chipboard shapes to create the background and layered strips of old paper along with a painted chipboard border to form the vertical piece. The black ribbon is exactly how it was cut off a present a long time ago and I topped it all with that gorgeous Manor House flower.

Vol 15, No 7
This was hopefully the only time I ever have something published that I'm not happy with! When the magazine offered me this regular article there was so little time to get the first couple of articles done. Neither of the layouts in this edition turned out the way I wanted but I had no time to re-do them. This will be a long post if I put all the layouts up so I'll just leave these ones out!

Vol 15 , No 8 and No 9
These were my articles about photographing your work for blogs and submissions and how to get published in magazines. I hope you got a few ideas from them! In a bit of a twist, the magazine chose some of my layouts that they had already accepted as the ones to publish with the second article. Here's one they chose.

I had fun creating this one. I randomly stuck chipboard letters all over the background but deliberately stuck the x and o where I did. I used Dylusions to spray over the centre of the layout and built the page up over that.

Vol 15, No 10
I chose a somewhat different subject for this one - I discovered that it can be pretty cool to create shadowbox layouts by raising the edges and other parts of a page. Adding 3D elements around the edges can really give the page that extra pop.

For this layout I cut the border from the Graphic 45 paper and added this over another piece of the same paper. To help you pick the detail on a flat photo, the border includes (clockwise from centre top) the trapeze girl, the ringmaster, the running clown, the curtain and the title. The pages are quite stunning in real life but don't show the detail on photos.

I hope you're enjoying the articles. If you have any comments or suggestions, by all means let me know!

Heather

Workshop Secrets Number 1

Hi all,

I must apologise for being missing in action a lot over the last couple of weeks. I just have so much on at the moment! Kids seem to need extra running around during the school hols, we have had a run of things on - mostly great fun but very time consuming! - plus I have a long list of scrapping deadlines to meet. All good problems to have though!

So, going back a bit now, I had my first Workshop Secrets article published in Scrapbooking Memories at the start of the year. This layout was inspired by me wanting to record my typical day. In the end I chose to record the last day before I turned 50. I then ended up with so many photos that I had to be clever to think how to present them well without the layout being too cluttered.

While I was pondering this I came down with a lurgy. A pretty sure sign I got a bit run down with all the running around for my big 50th birthday bash! Anyway, this left me too sick to work but, not surprisingly, not so sick that I couldn't scrap! I found some old Bella chipboard shapes and just started fiddling. I sprayed, stamped, inked, painted, embossed and stained the chipboard shapes then decorated them with everything from liquid pearls to ribbon. I had a lot of fun!

Here's the end result:

Even though my typical day isn't too exciting, I think I'll look back on this in the future and it will trigger lots of good memories for me.

Here are some close-ups:

I liked including things that I do a lot of, for example driving along our beautiful country roads or walking around our local lake.

The Manor House Creations flowers worked beautifully in this. They helped to soften the grid pattern and provided a bit of a soft touch to the factual page. I loved the way the chipboard worked behind them. I painted it white then put drops of liquid pearls on the ends. I think this is a Scrapmatts chippie. That beautiful background paper is The Scrapcake paper which I lightly gessoed over.

In this section I've used paint, Stickles, paper, chipboard, twine, ink, stamps and embossing powder. Whatever works!

I love the paint splats on the chippie on the left. I made them by quickly squeezing an almost empty tube of paint over the surface. Keep important things clear though - it can spray further than you want it to!

I hope you enjoyed this layout and my other Workshop Secrets articles. It was a bit hectic getting those first few articles together as I had very little time but they should hopefully be swinging along nicely now. I have loads more ideas about what I should write about but if there's anything in particular you'd like to suggest by all means let me know.

Happy scrappin'!

Heather

My Big News!

One thing that I think is difficult in the blogging world is treading the fine line between boasting and informing. I sometimes find it hard to tell people when great scrappy things happen to me as I don't want my blogging friends to think I'm just a pain in the neck! To decide if I will tell people about something I ask myself if I would like to know this information if I was a follower of someone else's blog. In this case the answer is yes, so here goes...

I have my own regular feature in Scrapbooking Memories magazine! It's called Workshop Secrets and the first one is in the latest copy of the mag which has just been published. Those who subscribe to the mag should have it very soon. For others it should be in the stores in the next few days.

The articles will vary a bit in their style and content but will always be a bit like attending a workshop. Hopefully I'll be able to bring different techniques and inspirational ideas to readers of all levels. Actually, I find that working to the abilities of the readers is the hardest part of the whole process. Some readers are complete beginners and others have been scrapping for years. Its very hard to find a middle ground but I guess that's something all teachers have to deal with.

In the coming months I talk about quite a variety of subjects which I hope will be of interest to many scrappers. Most of my topics are based on what I've learnt when I've had to deal with a particular problem. By that I mean things like "how do I create this type of effect with that product?" Not all my topics are like this though and my first one came about in a completely different way. I was struck down with a lurgy for about 10 days. I was too sick to work and even too sick to seriously scrap - gasp! So I just sat in my scrap room and faffed around. I hauled out that pack of chippy shapes and just played with them, just seeing what I could create. As I wasn't pushed for time (an uncommon thing for me) I was able to just experiment and I had a blast. The layout is only printed small in the mag so it's hard to see the detail but I hope you get the general idea. I'll put close ups on my blog later.

I do hope you get to read my articles and enjoy them. If there's something you don't like about them, please let me know. If you do like them, again let me know but it would be great if you could tell the editors as well! I'm not sure that putting Cassie's email address here is a very professional thing to do but most of the email addresses in the mag would reach either Cassie or Vanessa.

2013 looks like being an amazing year for me. Even though this blog reaches out into cyberspace it really is just you, my loyal blogger friends, who are following this journey with me. Thank you all so much for your support and encouragement.

Woohoo!

Heather