Sunday Challenge

Today our lovely Sara has created a sketch for us. Most of our DT love sketches, and we know a lot of you guys do too, so we're going to make it a regular feature - the last Sunday of each month will be our sketch Sunday.

But... did you think we wouldn't notice that it's halloween today? Along with the sketch, you need to make your page with a halloween theme! If you don't celebrate halloween where you live then feel free to use a different holiday theme.

Don't forget that you have until 6th November to upload any of the October challenges and add a link to the Inlinkz sidebar :)

We're really sad to see Justina go but she's certianly going out with a bang with her lovely take on the sketch this week. Thank you so much for being a part of the team Justina. We've loved having you on board:

We don't celebrate Halloween over here, so I decided to scrap a simple piece about the first time we brought my son, Jude to the Mid-autumn lantern festival. I drew clouds inspired by those I've seen in some chinese paintings, using stickles, and distressed them to give them some colour, and added a lantern made using acetate paper and half a disposable chopstick. Since the festival is celebrated when there's a full moon, I added a moon behind the clouds too, using glimmer mist.

Amanda:
I rotated the sketch 180 degrees and did go a bit wayward, but it's there, honest!

Anna:

I don't really celebrate Halloween, I've never really been into it. I don't mind pumpkins like this, it's quite a nice autumn sight but I got really frightened by the carved pumpkins faces when I was young and I still dredge seeing them now!! So this is as far as I go with Halloween! I don't even own any Halloween patterned papers so I used some Halloween type coloured papers, distressed them and drew some cobwebs to give it a bit more of a spooky effect.
Fabi:
Material used: Basil cardstock cream, Papers: Webster, MM, Bo Bunny;
flowers: prima; hipboard: WRMK, leaves (plastic/no brand flowers),
green paiting/glue; glimmer mist green forest

We don't have Hallowen in Brazil...only some schools have a small party, based on the US holiday so kids go to school and play about, etc. But is not traditional here. So for this challenge Ive scrapped about other holiday: Xmas! This was a great chance as I still had Xmas pictures from last year not scrapped (does this happens only with me or you remember your Xmas pictures just when another one is close?! lol).
Pedro loves to go to the shopping center and take pictures with Santa (he still believes he is the real one). And here a close up on the details. Ive used some leaves from those plastic flowers and added an extra adding some glitter to it. And to add a bit of layer to the paper, Ive used some glue/painting to reinforce some of the paper design.

Lisa:
Nic:I loved using the sketch to create this:

The halloween theme was a bit more tricky as now my son is all grown up, we don't tend to really celebrate this holiday any more and we don't have any photos from the times when we did. This fact was echoed in my stash, as after searching through it all I only had the one piece of halloween themed paper! Not to be defeated, I had the idea of creating a page about my son's scooby dooby doo room guard toy which he loved in his younger days. And after all, scooby and his gang were the ultimate ghostly goings on crime solvers............so a bit of a halloween link there ;-)

Rebekah:

As previously dicussed I don't do Halloween and I'm therefore Halloweened out with my one LO already done :) So I decided to scrap some of last year's Christmas photos that have been sat on the side for the last 10 months waiting to be scrapped. I flipped the sketch upside down so that the title could go in the top left hand corner. I used The Glitter Girls Collection 'Treasured Memories' embossing board to give the LO an embossed edge which I inked to show it off. I also used the board to create the box below the photos. The paper's are My Minds Eye 'So Sophie', which I love.

Tessa:

I had so much fun with this layout! My fingers were black and blue when I was done playing with gesso, mist, ink, paint, and more ink. This was a very pretty sheet of Parisian Anthology paper, but now - oh so creepy! I wish I could take a photograph that does it justice. I used a photo editing site to create the scary effects on my picture (a la Rebekah's Wednesday extra!). Happy Halloween everyone!

Valerie:Love a good sketch challenge and I'm looking forward to having one every month here at The Studio! Thanks to Sara for this one! I pretty much stuck with the program. I liked how the title balanced the photo so I didn't change very much. I did add a little block at the top to repeat the black accent from the frames.

materials: patterned paper: Basic Grey, Studio Calico; Girl's Paperie packaging; rub on: Hambly; frames, brad: K & Co; token: letter stickers: Making Memories, Sassafras Lass; journal spot: Basic Grey; Tim Holtz; string: Stampin Up; words: Scrap Rat; sticker: October Afternoon; washi tape, sewing

Wednesday extra - 27/10/2010

Today, we have a fabulous, off the page project to share, designed by Amanda.

Amanda has used two blank canvases in order to create a personalised home decor piece with a dual purpose - whilst at first glance, it might appear to be a decorative frame, it also acts as the storage unit for a small mini book - clever huh?

   
If you've been tempted to use your creativity (and some of your scrapbooking stash!) to go 'off the page' and make a display project for your home, Amanda has provided step by step instructions for us which can be viewed, printed or downloaded here. 

Sunday challenge

There was a collective groan when we saw this challenge come up but I think you'll agree that the design team did a great job with it and we hope that it'll inspire you too. Don't forget to upload your challenge using the sidebar to be in with a chance of winning a Scrap Rat prize :)

"OK, I'm running the risk of scaring all of our followers away this week. It's a toughie, according to majority of the Design Team! For me, who could write until the cows come home, it was not so hard!

Are you ready? Your journalling must take up at least 50% of your scrapbook page."
Our Guest Designer, Justina, created this stunning LO:

Hello! I found this week's challenge tough, since I'm not used to writing so much on my LOs! I sorta cheated, since all my journalling is hidden, but if you look at all of the writing at one shot, it does fill up more than 50% of the LO... :) I used a sketch over at Crate Paper, and used each square in the sketch as a "door" behind which I added some writing. Each door is decorated with an aspect of my son at 21 months (for example, his love for boats, hats, airplanes and books, as well as his ability to identify certain alphabets etc), along with some corresponding journalling behind the door. There is also a letter to him hidden behind the photograph! I really enjoyed this week's challenge, and now I have a neat little record of my boy's development at 21 months. :) Thanks for the amazing challenge!

Amanda:

My layout focuses on the relationship between the two men in my life. I wanted to put down my thoughts on them and what they mean to each other, and how I love the relationship they have. Believe it or not I had trouble limiting what I wanted to say!

Anna:

Well this was a challenge! A lot of journaling doesn't really suit my scrapping style as I like quite a lot of white spaceon my layouts. I had this photo that had a funny story attached to it that I thought would take a of explaining so would be good for this challenge. I wrote the story out in a block and put it on my page with the photo and I didn't know what to do with it as it took up so much space!! So I had to cut the story into smaller blocks so it gave me more to work with!

Fabi:

Material used: papers from crate paper, cosmo cricket. buttons (no brand),
laces (no brand) and blings from maya road, felt: arte.1 (Brazililan brand).

I simply LOVED this challenge...i love writting and never did such a huge journaling - ever! This was a page made really from my heart and will be a great memory for my family. Thanks Amanda for this inspiration!

Here a close up:

Nic:
As I am a bit of a 'war and peace' journaler and usually end up trying to condense what I want to write into far, far fewer words - I loved this challenge!

Although I like to journal, for this LO I didn't want my journaling to overpower everything else on the page and ideally wanted to achieve a soft, faded look. So I got out a pencil, some tissue paper and mod podge and had a go at a bit of paper mache pasting, which I have to say was a lot of fun!

Rebekah:Given that today is my son's 4th Birthday this was an easy choice for me and I wrote my little boy a letter on his 4th Birthday. I actually love journalling and for me it's a great way of capturing the moments that go with a photo. I just don't like my hand writing is all :)

Tessa:

I could go on and on and on about my little one, Jaxon, but I decided to use someone else's voice for this challenge. I recently fell in love with a song by Mindy Gledhill called "Hourglass" that perfectly suits my feelings and thoughts about my son. My journaling is the lyrics to that beautiful song. To mix it up a bit I chose words that I wanted to stand out and "wrote" them in alpha stickers. The rest is my handwriting - the messy places are where Jaxon climbed into my chair with me :)

Valerie:

For this challenge I decided to write about the significance of my cookie jar - which belonged to my Grandmother until she passed away in 2006. For 40 years I took cookies out of that jar on her kitchen counter. This simple object is priceless to me. I had a lot to say about it (and much more probably) so I knew it would be a great subject for this challenge.

materials: Cardstock: Bazzill; patterned paper: MME, Studio Calico, American Crafts; letters: October Afternoon, American Crafts; stickers: October Afternoon; frame: Making Memories; small words, button: Scrap Rat; string: Martha Stewart; pen: Stampin Up

OK, STOP!

LOL I guess you are all out there, my mailbox just had a minor breakdown!!

Sorry to all you other snappy fingered typists, the spot goes to Julie Dix, who must have smoke coming off the ends of her fingers!

Congrats, Julie!

This was a lot of fun. I might have to do it like this again!

Who's paying attention?!

Today I noticed that for the first time in the history of The Studio, I've had nobody email me about a guest design spot this month. I normally have a fair few emails to look at when I start thinking about guests :)

So... this is good news for anyone who is paying attention right now!

The first person to email me, with 'December Guest' in the subject and a link to their blog in the email will be our December guest designer!

Email to: amanda@scrapbook-101.com

Go!

Oh, and if still nobody emails me, I'm going to cry and stamp my feet ;)

Wednesday Extra- Rebekah

I love seeing my work published. I get a buzz when I see a LO somewhere that I've not put it myself. So I jumped at the chance of contributing to the Reader's gallery in Scrapbook Magazine. Only trouble was that the theme was Halloween and I don't do Halloween so at first I had to decline. That very afternoon we went to a friend's house for tea and the Dad of the house offered to do face painting. When Connor was asked what he wanted done he said 'skeleton' out of nowhere! Perfect I thought except that I didn't have my camera with me. Luckily Tony has one of these fancy phones and he was able to take a photo and send it to me.

Have you come across Picasa? It's a free photo editing program from Google and I use it on a daily basis for all my basic fixes. You can rotate by degree, add fill or highlight or shadown, add a tint and lots of other great edits. So I edited the photo in picasa to add some green tints and lighten it all up a bit and went from this:

to this:
I mounted this on some Doodlebug 'Crushed Velvet Cardstock' beetle. So now I had my photo, but I didn't have any papers and a trip to Hobbycraft proved that they'd bypassed Halloween and gone straight to Christmas :( I'm not easily beaten though and I'm resourceful so I decided to make my own Halloween designed paper. I started with a piece of Scenic Route 'Background Blue Grid White' and a piece of safmat. On the safmat I printed some pictures that I found from google images from:
The images were from:
http://www.squidoo.com/PrintableBorders
http://www.leehansen.com/clipart/Holidays/Halloween/index.html
http://www.celebrating-halloween.com/pumpkincarving/spiders-web-pattern.shtml
http://www.clker.com/clipart-9880.html

I found so many free downloadable sites whilst I was doing this search including some great scrapbooking sites with vintage images so I was really chuffed.

The first image of the tree I stuck in the bottom left hand corner. On top of this I stuck a small piece of torn and inked paper from a piece that a friend from America had sent me years ago (New Seasons 'Holiday Scrapbook Set') and an orange ticket that Ifa Zainon sent me for winning a competition on UK Scrappers last year. I used MM coloured staples to attach the ticket too. I cut out a bat shape and stuck that flying away from the bottom corner using foam squares to give it height. Then it was on to the top right hand corner. For this I found a fab spider's web with a dangling spider, which again I printed on to safmat.

I stuck the spider's web on with the spider dangling down beside the photo and the spider web under the photo corner. I took a second piece of the patterned paper (Halloween colours!), which again I tore and inked before tucking it behind the positioned photo (not yet stuck down).

Next it was the full spider's web and spider's turn. Again this was printed on safmat but then I cut it in half. Once I'd peeled the backing off and stuck the spider down, I put the backing on top of the safmat and used Maya Road Glimmer mist from Bubbly Funk. Once I removed the safmat backing the spiders web was clear, but the glimmer mist extended from it.

Now I stuck the photo in position and stapled the top left hand corner with coloured staples again and towards the bottom of the photo also. I took a final piece of the patterened paper and tore and inked it. This was stuck at the bottom of the photo. I printed a row of cats and dancing skeletons on to safmat.

The skeletons were printed small enough to fit on to an orange ticket from my stash from Indigo Mill and the kitty cats were stuck under the patterened paper. I used an orange journalling tag from Elle's Studio 'Chic note tags' and finally I stuck the second half of the spider's web on. Using a black pen I followed the line from the spiders web at the top all the way around the LO.

For the title I found the most Halloweenish colours I had (orange and purple in this case) and stuck them on. They are American Crafts Thickers 'Sprinkles' lavender and
Doodlebug 'Shin dig' Tangerine. I went with the title 'Dem bones, Dem bones' because it's Connor's favourite song right now and has sparked his skeleton fascination. And here is the final LO all complete:

I'll never be afraid to make a LO without having the seasonal paper again. Why don't you give printing your own images to use as embellishments this week and let us know how you got on?

Sunday Challenge

Happy Sunday everyone! October is another month that seems to be running away with me. I can't believe we're half way through it already and we're on our third challenge today. Try this one on for size:

My house is slowly but surely being taken over by scrapbooking supplies. I'm sure a lot of you feel the same way. It's not physically possile to use them all at the rate I buy them, so I'm always looking for new ways to use things up. This week, I want to see you all WEARING your stash! OK, I don't expect you to make paper ball gowns (although you can if you wish!), but a little something like a piece of jewelery, hair accessory or brooch shouldn't cause you too much trouble :)

There is some great inspiration for this out there (especially on etsy) but to get you started, here's what the design team did:

Guest Designer Justina:
I dug out ribbons and lace from my stash, along with an old fake pearl necklace, tied them together, and attached them to a Prima flower that I had for ages (but never got down to using since it was rather large). Ice stickles was added to the petal edges for some extra shine! This now hangs on my diaper bag, I think it helps to make the clunky (and usually overstuffed bag) look prettier... :)

Amanda:

I used some memory glass from Ranger as the basis for my necklace. I've had it in my drawer for what seems like FOREVER. I'd never even opened the box until now. I wanted to keep it fairly simple and wearable, so just used a simple clear sticker between the glass. I then added a turquoise pendant that came off of an old belt, along with a bead, a crystal and some velvet ribbon to hold it all together. It didn't take long to use up some old bits and pieces and turn them into something fun :)

Anna:

I made this brooch from some lace and ribbon from my stash and added a sequin and bead to the centre of each flower.

Lisa:


Since having my hair cut recently and having a fringe(bangs)added, I've been enjoying wearing hair clips again.
So, I've taken a Basic Grey cozy posie, added some wire around one of the little petals and twisted around very tightly to a plain hair grip. And there you have it. A Basic Grey hair slide : )


Tessa:

Although I like to think that I make good use of my scrap drawer, it always seems to be overflowing. So, I took a scrap piece of Crate Paper paper and cut it into triangular strips. I rolled the strips and secured the ends with glue. Several coats of decoupage varnish later, I had pretty beads to make a bracelet with. I wouldn't consider the bracelet waterproof, but it has worn well and gets a lot of compliments.

Valerie:

For this fun project I decided to make a headband for my daughter. She's pretty girly so I knew flowers were a must. I started by wrapping a thin plastic headband with brown satin ribbon, approximately 3/4" wide. The crocheted flowers, made by a friend, were embellished with ruffled ribbon that was woven through the holes. I then added the 'blingy' centers. Here it is on my model:

and here's a close up:

materials: ruffled ribbon: Making Memories; bling: Prima; flowers: handmade; headband: Goody; satin ribbon: craft supply

Wednesday 13th October 2010

Today we have our first seasonal Wednesday extra project for you from Fabi.

Now, some would say, it's never too early to start thinking about those christmas projects (it is only 73 days away you know *winks*!)  With that in mind, Fabi has recycled and completely tranformed one of those plastic hangers often found in clothes packaging, in order to create this cute and fun but special place to store those treasured christmas wishes letters to santa. 

Fabi's tutorial for this project can be found here.

Fabi also included this rather sweet photo of her son holding up his christmas hanger - think it's a foregone conclusion that this project was a definite hit with him eh?!

Sunday Challenge

This one could bring all those embarassing secrets out in the open ;)

Guilty pleasures... everyone's got at least one, surely? What is yours? Feature it on a scrapbook page and tell the world!
So come on! Let's see those guilty pleasures. Here are the design team secrets...


Amanda:





There are some things you really shouldn't put out there, in the public domain. This may well be one of those times!

My journaling reads:
After dark, lights out, it's Metallica time! My guilty pleasure is taking time out, loading up Guitar Hero, and rocking out! Sometimes I play when, really, I should be doing housework. And as heavy as the music is, it soothes my soul. A place I truly escape to. And, of course, my pleasure has nothing to do with my unhealthy attraction to James Hetfield. I'm a rock chick at heart.

My layout even includes a Metallica badge that my OH bought me for Christmas as a joke ;) I still have 7 of those left. Maybe I should pull out my denim jacket from the 80s and start decorating??

Anna:

My guilty pleasure is a British boyband called Mcfly!! They are loved my teenage girls but I sercertly love them too!! Their songs are great to sing along to!

Fabi:

Hey girls...is rainning for a few days now...and cold, it doesnt even looks like spring. i hope tomorrow there's a bit of sun or id start feel like a frog in a pond lol.
Im sorry that the picture isnt the best, but is been hard to photograph here latelly :/
I have used one of my US pictures (of course lol). This was in a very nice day at the beach, on my last weekend there.

So i thought about it and decided that my major (yes, i have more than one lol) guilty pleasure is finding some time only for me :)

Lisa:

My guilty pleasure. Come Dine With Me.
A UK TV series which I can't get enough of. I'm not overly bothered by TV, but do confess to sky plussing this series and I even daydream about being a contestant and put imaginary menus together in my head. Oh what a confession!!! How sad am I??!!

Nic:

My guilty pleasure is having a PJ day – you know, one of those days where you stay inside clad in those comfy PJ’s, keep the world at bay, and completely chill out. I don’t manage to fit them into my schedule as often as I would like, but when I do squeeze one in, I always feel a little tinge of guilt for doing so as thoughts of the 101 others things I should be doing often creep into my consciousness!

I attempted to create a circular border frame to mimic the fabric flower on my slippers – this folds down when placed in a page protector.

Rebekah:
As a thirty something woman I probably shouldn't be watching 'High School Musical' for pleasure, but I do. It got me through hours of cleaning and sorting for a week in summer when I went room by room getting back to basics, and I often have it on in the evenings when I'm crafting. It's so cheesy, but I love it :)


Tessa:

Valerie:

I have always had a thing for magazines. I don't know why. Even as a small child I remember sitting in my mom's hair salon reading Ladies Home Journal. Maybe the glossy representations of perfect lives, beautiful food, homes and 'things'...I'm sure a psychiatrist would have a theory. Anyway, my love grew as I got older - first to teen heartthrob magazines (anything covered with Andy Gibb) then fashion magazines as I became a teenager, on to home decoration and design when I started design school at college. Now it's any and all topics. I'm an equal opportunity reader. Just wish I had more time to read them!

materials: Patterned paper, stamps: Studio Calico; letter stickers, border sticker: Basic Grey; embossing powder: American Crafts