Ingredients Challenge Number 1 - February

Remember the ingredients challenge I posted about last month? Well here is the first instalment of this challenge. We are going to run a poll for the next week to see which layout you like the best and the person with the most votes on February 20th at 8pm will be receiving the a shopping voucher for ATDML.

These three ladies received an identical kit and produced very different layouts - just like my Pancakes & yorkshire Puddings analogy HERE!

Ally Bright: I am a 36yrs old full time civil servant along with being divorced mum to 3 aged 9 and 6 (twins). In my spare time i love Photography, scrapping, altered art and art journalling, travelling and geocaching. I have been scrapping almost 6yrs now and recently fallen in love with art journalling. Thanks for letting me play with the ingredients xxx

Julie Kirk: "I've been making 'scrapbooks' ever since I could cut out wonkily with scissors and throw glue around ... both which I still do today! But as far as scrapping as we know it goes, that's only really been for the last 4 years. Now I spend most [if not all] of my spare time creating and blogging design team work and projects for my own blogs. I can't really remember what I used to do with my free time before I discovered the joy of collecting paper and recording my story".

Kirsty Riach: When I am not scrapping, I am a 24 year old Primary Teacher at a large school in the north of Scotland. I started scrapping in 2009 to capture all the moments during my first year of teaching and in the end the scrapbook I created helped me land a permanent job! Naturally from then on in I was hooked and my bank balance has taken a blow from my love of scrapping (good thing I got that permanent job!). As scrapbooking is still fairly new to me, I feel that my own style is just starting to take off and no doubt the new CHA releases will also help!

The ingredients were:

1 sheet of Bella Blvd Flirty: Bits A Bella
1 sheet of Bella Blvd Flirty: He Loves Me
1 sheet of Bella Blvd Flirty: Omigosh

1 sheet of Bazzil Cardstock: Skylar

Selection of Buttons

Selection of Ribbons

In addition the participants were allowed to add \use certain items from a specified list:

1 sheet of either black or white cardstock

Photos (obviously)

Pens, ink, paint

Needle & thread \ sewing machine

Punches and die cutting machines

Here are the layouts they produced.

Ally:

We loved: the angle Ally placed her photo and the cluster of embellishments in the lower right hand corner of the photo which are very eye catching.

Julie:

We loved: Julie's use of negative (empty) space at the top of the layout to draw your eyes down and focus on the photos and journaling.

Kirsty:

We loved: Kirsty's use of repetition with the punched shapes, the butterflies overlapping the scalloped circles to add variety and the bracket highlighting the photo.

Coming Tomorrow....

Lots of gorgeous goodies from My Minds Eye and some resotcks of the Prima which FLEW off the shelves!

Talking of the Prima I have had a wonderful evening after a very hectic day. I sat at my desk with a sheet of each of the six "Strawberry Kisses" papers and played. The best thing was I found photos to go with every paper in the line without any trouble (using my new Stacy Julian style category boxes!)

I have done one layout tonight and will share it on here sometime in the next few days, and i will probably try to do a few more layouts from this line this weekend so I can share a selection of Strawberry Kisses layouts here.

It's been a crazy busy day and I need some sleep before another busy day tomorrow so I will leave you to dream of more new lovely products heading our way tomorrow.

Re - Giveaway!

Remember these Hero Arts stamps?

Well the person who won them didn't leave an email and their blogger profile is not available. Despite posting on here and appealing on UKS I have left it another week now and no-one has emailed me to claim them and I am seriously going to open them and start using them if I don't get them sent out quickly!

So I went back to Random dot Org and got me a new number

Congratulations Michelle, at the second attempt you are the recipient of these stamps. I have just had a nosey at your blog and you seem to be quite a card maker so I hope these will help fuel your creativity even more :)

So How Do You Do It?

A week or so ago I purchased from a fellow scrapper a copy of Stacy Julians "Photo Freedom" book. I tohught it would be interesting to read although I wasn't convinced it would be relevant to ME.

Well at the weekend I started to read it and on Monday, feeling poorly I had a lazy day and mooched around and read the rest of this book cover to cover. Then I made notes.

I was a little bit surprised to find that not only did I think it was relevant to me I actually was giving serious consideration to giving her Library of Memories \ Photo Freedom system a try.

As many scrappers will know there is often that dreaded feeling of not being "caught up" I thought i was pretty easy going with that problem so there wasn't a need for me to address that one. However, what I do have is a HUGE problem of two separate albums (well series of albums) one for each of my children. That is where my big problem lay. I started scrapping the year before I had Isabelle and I took a LOT of photos of her in her first year. Of course I took a lot of Olivia and many were better quality photos but with a toddler and a baby in terms of scrapping I was way less productive in terms of scrapping Olivias albums. I was shocked to see that when Olivia was one I had less than a quarter of the number of layouts of her first year than i had from Isabelles. Of course I then made a concerted effort to even things up but it is my big concern.

Sooooo, Stacys book has made me think about why I am scrapping (to preserve memories, to enjoy the therapy of crafting and for others to enjoy) I have often had the thought in my head of who will end up with the albums and this is where the separate albums problem comes in - I am going to make a concerted effort not to be so preoccupied with who ends up with the layouts (they may end up in a skip when I am gone!) but try to focus on the three reasons I listed above.

So I am thinking of keeping a "first year album for each of the girls (already completed and filed) and then rehoming everything beyond that and from now on in the Library of Memories style, it may work, it may not but it is totally reversible if I hate it!

To embrace Stacys method I have made a massive effort to organise my photos into storage binders (except I used Tesco slip in photo albums!) and I have set up my Category Drawers (except I used index card boxes) The principle of this is that I will approach the scrapping differently by using the category drawers I will make links and connections that wouldn't have been obvious if I was scrapping chronologically. The theory sounds great - I will let you know how it goes!

If you have a particular approach to scrapping and organising, or if you have tried (or not) the Library of Memories system and have any comments on it do leave a comment here, or post about it on your blog and link to your post in the comments box. I would love to hear what you think.

Sketch Inspiration Number 3

Time for the first of our two sketches for February. As before take the sketch as a starting point and develop it as the creative impulse takes you! Upload your layout online somewhere and post a comment on this post with a link to your layout before March 3rd. We will choose our favourite layout from those uploaded and linked to the two February sketches and send a £10 shopping voucher to the winner.

Here is the sketch

And here are two layouts based on the sketch.

Hope you enjoy creating your own version.

February Design Team Gallery

This months Design Team Gallery is now online HERE on our site. We were so pleased this month to have Maria Horton as our guest designer. If you have looked back through our old galleries (there is plenty of inspiration for using up those papers you bought and saved for a special project!) you will know that Maria was on our original Design Team. Infact she won the Newbie section of our Design Team competition and helped fill our earlier galleries with glorious inspiration!

Here is a little sneak peek of the items in the gallery but do be sure to come over and take a proper look.

SEVENTY ONE....

That's how many new Prima Products we have added to the website over the past two days. Take a look at all the gorgeous papers, flowers and embellishments which have been uploaded HERE in the New Products section of our website.

Do come back tomorrow as it is Design Team gallery day and there is lots of fabulous inspiration using 4 different valentines lines with ideas on a traditional valentines theme and also several layouts and projects showing you that these lines can be versatile enough to create all sorts of things not all of which are love and valentines themed.