Crate Paper Confetti and the Virtual Crop

Crate Paper has long been a favourite of mine, I love the colours and patterns and that for every pink piece of paper there tends to be some more masculine colours on the reverse, so I was delighted when Mel and Jill from A Trip Down Memory Lane sent me some of the Confetti papers for my Virtual Crop kit.  The Crop was last weekend but you can still see all the blogposts here and all the classes are available to download (here is a link to mine), there may be a couple of kits left in the shop too.

For the first page I went with the pinks as they really fitted with my photos of my Grandma and kids, we spent a lovely day visiting her and being out and about in her home town, and she always treats the kids!  I used some of the Maggie Holmes pockets in my page which I really like as you just slot all the bits in and they are great for making shakers or putting in memorabilia.

I do love woodgrain, and I used the pockets to influence my photo arrangement and make some passport photo style strips.  As the photos were wintry I dusted the page with snowflakes!

I did a messy page too, this uses gesso and then mustard seed distress re-inker for the vibrant yellow, I really like to add some paint as another layer on a page.  This is my youngest making sandcastles with a bucket and spade he had his lunch in - yes fish and chips in a bucket and spade!

This Makes me Happy

Earlier in the year we went skating and it happened to coincide with Shaun the Sheep being there to help launch his movie.  We got to make cupcakes  and then Shaun appeared on the ice and for photos - after a bit of debate both the kids decided that Shaun was cool enough to have their photos with!

I over-exposed the photo in the editing software on my phone and printed it 4" square then used a corner rounder (something I've not used in a while!) and made a poloroid style photo mount.  The papers are from Crate Papers Craft Market and a little bit of the Confetti range too (left over my classes at the ATDML retreat) - they are beautiful complete with gold foiling and golden glitter that doesn't come off!  The base of my page was covered in gesso, then ink and embossing powder in greys, blues and golds.  I then drew some circles in pencil around and started to layer up my papers.  I mixed in a material coaster from the pound store and some muslin.  As there were quite a few layers on my page stapling it made it easier to work with and went with the silvery theme too.  The finishing details were some little pearls ands sticker stars.

The Hunt

This second page from my class with Ann - some more lovely gold embossing with one of her alphabets - I went a little bit off her layout - I kept the same photo arrangement and enjoyed using all the bits we had left over from the first page - I also love the gold skeleton leaves that were in with the kit.

The page is on the same theme as the first - this is the egg hunt and loads of cousins running around the house hunting for clues and trying to work out what they mean!

Happy

Here is another class from the weekend - this is my first page from Ann Freeman's Crate Paper Confetti class (I did go a bit wrong, but never mind!!).  

There was lots of layering, pleating of tickets, distressing and some gold embossing - I am loving that look at the moment!  I choose the ticket colours to pull out the colours of the eggs in the photos - this is one shot from Easter and the Easter Egg hunt my Mum runs which has the kids running all around the house searching for clues!