Hanging Out

This one of our photos from earlier in the year when we went to visit Port Lympne animal park....so not shots of the animals or the jeep safari we went on, just one of my DS on the monkey bars :).  I used My Minds Eye little boy blue papers, and inked with the lovely walnut stain distress ink.  I quickly soaked a piece of paper under the tap and made a crumpled paper ribbon, then used a technique from Gabriella on the Bo Bunny blog to make all the water distressed flowers.  I used the My Minds Eye paper and them also some chocolate box co-ordinations which I sanded then soaked - I inked the other paper, layered them up and stickled them.  I only have a couple of flower punches which don't really look like the ones in the tutorial so I just used the deckle edge scissor technique she suggests.  They were great fun, I ended up soaking them a little under the tap as where is an empty mister when you want one :)  The rest of the flowers are from a prima pack, the pearls are liquid pearls I dabbed around, and the alphabet is a papermania one.  Here are some close ups.....





Sun, Sea and Sand

Here are some of our holiday pictures....my kids love the beach and can dig in the sand for ages, redirecting channels of waters, building castles to see how long their defences will last against the sea - keeps them happy for hours.  I tried to keep the colours on my LO sandy, just picking up the blue from the t-shirts and water.  I used DCWV luxury stack for the shaped card (cut out the pattern myself) and then edged it with some more paper and my crinkle scissors.  Used quite a lot of distress ink - walnut and broken china, some prima lace and paper mania stickers, liquid pearls and stickles too, and some more of my tiny star beads :)  Here are some more close ups.

Glass Flowers

Finally after getting my melt pot I decided to have a go at the Papertrail blog tutorial on glass flowers by Laura.

I didn't manage to get a really even coating of UTEE with my melt pot but soon realised (after a few burnt fingers) that it was nearly impossible and didn't matter....all you need to do is heat it up with your heat gun afterwards (on the non stick and heat proof mat) and then put all the excess utee back in the pot to remelt. So once I got the hang I then made some MS butterflies.and on her suggestion also dunked the paper roses layer by layer (from the rose tutorial) in too. Now I just need to create a LO for them all :) It's a great tutorial so go have a look.

Kite Flying

I picked up some large die cut papers and thought this cloudy shaped one was perfect for my kite flying photos. The papers is crate paper, the bird houses are from jillibean cabbage soup, and the other papers are october afternoon and cosmo cricket. I put some hidden journalling behind the photo - I am a really bad journaller so included more details hear, I made some more windmills, and then cut a couple of different papers up to make the kites, and put 2 of the triangles of the kite on foam to make it more 3d. I then stitched the tails, and the 1st three I tied some thin ribbon around the stitches to try and make it look authentic :) Again I used my MS double loop punch - love that one, and a Tim Holtz ticked, there is a little bit of inking in there too. I tried to keep the page fun - it is the 1st time we have flown our dragon kite and to my surprise it worked really well.

Jumping Waves

My 1st blog in ages, we did have a very long and lovely holiday in France for the whole of August so it feels like ages since I have scrapped....so to get me going I decided to have a go at the Sarahs cards challenge to create a summer LO and use some distressing. The papers I have used are October Afternoon - Fly a Kite - just love all the colours. I distressed most of the edges of the papers. I used a Martha Stewart Fan punch to create the fan edge, and inked the orange paper with red distress ink to make it feel more summery and hot, I did a crumpled paper band by damping then folding the paper, popped some wool on the top and stamped out the 1st part of my title. I also had at these little circle flowers, a tutorial is on the sarahs cards site . The last part was to add some Faux stitching - this is a shot of my DS and one of his good friends having a go surfing on a body board and jumping waves, the shot was in May so the water was still to cold for most adults to go near but they loved it.

Hope you all had nice summer breaks, I'll post more often now :) Here are the close ups.