Flowers for the Fourth? July Counterfeit Kit Challenge blog hop

Welcome to the July Blog Hop for the Counterfeit Kit Challenge!   You should have arrived here from Angela's Blog. If you are lost or arrived here first by mistake, hop on over to The Counterfeit Kit's website to find the right path. I hope you enjoy all of the projects being shared!

If you had come to me last month and asked me which papers from my stash would be used to scrap our family Fourth of July memories, Floral prints would definitely not have been on the list. Yet here they are on this next page! I got the idea from the counterfeit kit club challenge.If you don't know what it is( though most likely you do if you are hopping along)... The idea is to scraplift a kit from a kit club using what you have in your stash. One of the kits I saw had a lot of blue and red  floral papers in them. Since flowers are not always easy to use on a page for boys, I felt this would be a great opportunity to use them. Oh...and would you believe there are travel themed items on the page too!?!? The journal spot and the tab sticker on the corner of the photo are from travel collections.

page maps sketch For Counterfeit Kit's 4th of July sketch challenge
starburst paper- Cosmo Cricket
all other papers Sassafrass
sassafrass border
Prima flowers
foof a la buttons
7 gypsies tab sticker and paper clip
Journal spot unknown( Maybe K and Co.)
Making Memories rub on alphas
hand made denim flowers
Basic grey Border sticker-cut apart

Originally, this was going to be a page about sparklers. However, I kept looking at this photo of my son and a sort of, deeper meaning manifested itself. He doesn't have the "trying too hard,sicky sweet smile" that he has had lately. It's the real him...just sweet and pure. So I journaled about that. The title for this page comes from a song by Bob Marley called "three little birds" which is the current challenge at Scrapping the Music.

  I did manage to make another page about the sparklers. We have not had any at the fourth for several years. So it was a nice treat for my son to have some and to share the fun with friends this year. Once again, the floral paper came through for me. I think it gives it sort of a vintage, yet warm feel to the page.

Sketch Inspiration #229
diamond Stickles
otherwise, everything use are scraps are from the above layout

I printed out my photos in wallet size. They were so nicely done on the photo paper, that I trimmed it down and used it as a collage style block. It was a HUGE time saver. My rub on alphas did not go on perfectly. I used a black marker to fix the letters as best I could. The "f" is still a little wiggly though.

 The next time you are feeling a little blue about not having the right themed papers in your stash, check out a kit club or the counterfeit Kit challenge. It just might give you some ideas to help you rethink how to use products you already own. Now it's time for you to hop on to Emily's Blog.

Some Most Unusual Flowers

  While I do love flowers( and readily admit to hoarding quite a few Primas in my stash) I will admit that I cringed a little when I heard that Scrap Our Stash's May challenge was all about flowers. I find flowers difficult to use on pages since my home is male dominated. I quickly realized that I had to get very creative with the types of flowers I would use for this challenge. I recently experimented with making my own zipper flower. I think the flowers look cool and they can have a bit of a masculine edge to them. However, the flowers I made were black...which is really not the colour you think of when you think of Spring flowers. Black flowers make me think of Halloween, which is why you are now going to see a Halloween layout in May.

 My son was a Predator( from the movie last year). I wanted a sort of grungy page to go along with his costume. I splattered some Tiger Lily and Black magic glimmer mist to provide a grungy background. I loved the Pink Paislee canvas label. It provided me with a title as well as a direction for the rest of the page. To match it's used look, I embossed some Coredinations cardstock with a Sizzix folder. I then distressed it to reveal parts of the orange colour in the core. The beads are actually part of a necklace my son got for me. We were Trick or Treating in Disney's Boardwalk hotel. They have games for the kids to play and the bead necklaces were one of the prizes. My Son was thrilled that I wanted to use it on a page( he even went back and won me several more necklaces just to be sure I had enough). I think it's a nice touch with the Satin ribbon and the staples. I used Making Memories papers for the other flowers. The smallest ones were made with a simple office style hole punch. I was inspired by a Big Picture Classes blog post to make the medium size flowers. I used a button punch to make mine. I used a Basic grey stmap with white ink along with an office date stamp, to make the badge. I stamped them on black card stock and then used clear embossing powder. So there you have it...a sort of grungy, Gothic floral page in the middle of May. Proof positive that flowers can be used on any page when you think outside the box.

Frugal Friday Tip- Salvaging What You Can

  I buy and use cheap luggage. I learned the hard way, that regardless of cost and claimed durability, luggage takes an extreme beating when you fly as frequently as we do.Often, given the beating it gets, expensive luggage has about the same life span as a cheap Walmart suitcase. To top it off, if the airline breaks it, they will either give you the cost of a cheap bag or cheap bag itself as a replacement. It's just not worth spending big money on luggage. Thanks to the airlines, a duffel bag style suitcase I have broke recently( the wheels came off and it was beyond repair). I realized I could do a little recycling. Armed with a sturdy pair of scissors, I cut the bag apart.

Not pictured is the one wheel I saved.I think it would be cool to use it with paint or ink. I'll roll it all over a paper for a grungy effect. I cut out several zippers which I can pull apart to use as trim or make into flowers. There were some cool metal tags and zipper pulls with the word "embark" on them which I can use in the future for travel layouts. I also cut off part of the handle figuring that these can also be used as an interesting trim. If you don't have a broken suitcase, consider going through old clothes in search of items to salvage. I have a pair of jeans that are not worth patching. I plan to use some of the pockets, the zipper, the label and the material itself to make my own embellishments.
  Lately, I have been coveting Maya Road's zipper trim. I have seen some neat flowers made from it and have wanted to make my own. Zipper trims just aren't readily available where I live and quite honestly, I'd like to avoid having to buy them since my scrappy budget is very limited. I considered buying regular zippers from the fabric store. I can get them for around $2 or less. It's a good option if you want a specific colour or don't have any salvageable items. However, I decided to use my salvaged zippers to experiment with before I bought any.

You will need thread( I recommend using a colour that matches the zipper) and felt. As shown above in the photo, I used only one side of the zipper. I simply separated it, cut it apart and saved the pull to use an embellishment on another project. I cut the felt into a small circle. It doesn't have to be a perfect circle and if there is any excess, you can trim it away when you are finished. I started by sewing one end of the zipper to the center of the felt circle.

Then I just slowly wound it around, stitching it in place as I went. It resulted in a small rose style flower. As mentioned before, I trimmed away any excess felt from the circle that showed at the edges.

 I like having the felt as a base for the flower. I think it makes it easier to adhere it to your page later on. Maya Road also has some zipper flower tutorials on their blog. They will give you ideas on how you can change the look of your flower.

 Happy Salvaging everyone!

Waiting for the World Record

  Last summer, we enjoyed the opportunity to witness a Guinness world record.That was something I thought we'd never get to do  and quite honestly, not something I thought to ever seek out. However, when a local resort heralded the opportunity to watch Nick Wallenda break his own world record, we decided it would be a nice family outing. We chose to sit at one of the resort's outdoor cafes. We enjoyed a pizza and some virgin frozen daquiris while we waited for the main event. After about a half an hour, Nick Wallenda made his appearance. He first walked across the tight rope about 260 feet in the air without a safety net. After which, He rode a bicycle across, thereby breaking his own world record.
 To commemorate this event, I chose some of Crate paper's restoration line from my Counterfeit kit  challenge March kit.I liked the bright fun colors and the vintage feel. I went on-line to Vintage Printables and found some wonderful vintage style circus posters.

submitted to Artastic Inspiration challenge blog
note the small bear riding a white horse on the vintage poster
also submitted to the Chopped Challenge for week 2 at Challenge Masters

I drew scallops and then filled them with white paint. The white paint with Bic mark it's Fandango pink and Summer melon reminded me of circus clown make up. I hand made the flowers using cardstock scraps, a prima flower and artsylicious brads. The tutorial for those can be found here at the Making Memories blog. Twinery lemondrop twine was stretched across both pages to symbolize the high wire.

Sassy Lil Sketch 3-7-11

Overall, it was a fun page for me to make. The colours are somewhat feminine and ones that I do not normally get to use. Yet here, with both the circus theme and the resort setting, they serve as a fun accent to the story of watching a world record in the making.

Hidden Messages

  Do you ever leave hidden messages on your pages? I really have not thought to until recently. Earlier this year, I chose to use a pocket for journal tags when I ran out of space on my page. On a more recent LO, I chose to use a hidden tag because I hope someday it will be a nice message for my son. One he'll understand as he grows up. I probably would not have done this had it not been for the recent Project Scrapbook challenge at Challenge Masters. I had to do a page about me...which is not my favorite topic. I would far rather scrap my wonderful son, handsome hubby or quirky cats. However, Given the challenge, I chose to make a page for my son ( and hopefully soon, one about his Dad) which tells him a little about me, my hopes for him and some facts about the time when he was born.

   I have wanted to include more of my son's art work in my pages, so I used this drawing he made of he and I if we were mice. I sewed it into a pocket on the page. I loved the warm cozy feel of the My Mind's Eye Be Loved papers. They reminded me of a quilt, so I used this Sassy Lil' Sketch:

I fussy cut some of the paisleys from the blocks of paper and used 3-d foam to make them pop. From the title block, I cut the word "mom" and then wrote variations of mom on the paper. I covered it with vellum, and once it was stitched on, added the word mom back with 3-d foam. The flowers were hand made from a wonderful tutorial found here. I made mine smaller using some scraps left over from making the blocks. Just remember to keep all of your paper strips the same length and to vary them in width by 1/4 inch. I finished the project with prima trim and K and company border stickers from the poppyseed collection.

If you do make the flowers, pop on over to Sketches for You. DT Member Brenda was the one who offered the tutorial and she has a monthly challenge with a RAK for you.

I'm on FIRE!

    Well, I am not literally on fire! Technically, I sort of got into a slump. Not because of creativity. More because life threw me a curvebal in the form of sick kid, sick dog, and then me, well, getting sick. See the theme here. It's not a pretty one. That being said, everyone feels better and it's a rainy lazy day here. I am having a hard time falling back into the homeschool routine today with the sound of the rain beating on the roof. I feel so cozy! So what better thing to do than scrap...and what better topic to scrap than a campfire! So I took Scrap Whispers challenge 78 and literally scrapped a campfire.

I have had this pad of Paper Pizzazz Vacation papers for what must be at least 4 years now. We all have paper like that! I think I bought it on a whim. There are some great vacation papers in it...many are just specific to certain locales. For Example, there is an ENTIRE page of labels for trips around the world to cities like Paris, Washington D.C, San Francisco...well, I could go on. I must have really been hoping that buying the paper would make tickets to these destinations materialize. LOL Anyway, I finally made use of some of the camp themed papers here on this page. There was even a tag to fussycut. I used scraps of the paper to create faux ribbons. All of the papers were inked with colorbox Chestnut roan.

If you like the handmade flowers, you can find a tutorial here. They are really easy and fun to make. You just need to monitor your microwave so you don't have a campfire in your home. Seriously. While I did not start a fire this time...let's just say, there have been many accidental campfires in my kitchen. This is why we own a fire extinguisher.  And that's all I have to say about that...

Sewing on the Edge

 I love handstitching. Quite honestly, I have yet to even pull out my sewing machine. I think getting that out of the closet would take longer than just handstitching on the page.LOL Sometimes, I want to sew right off the edge of the page. It really is far simpler than you might think.

I first start off with marking my holes. You can do this with a bazzill template. You can also use a piece of plastic canvas as a guide. Or, as in this case, you can draw it free hand. I used embellishments found in the Crate Paper Brook Collection kit as my inspiration. Take your paper piercer and punch the holes. When you get close to the edge, make sure to be very careful not to rip it.

This photo gives you an idea of how close to the edge you can get.

Start stitching away. You may wish to start a little ways from the edge of the page. That way, your knot won't hang off the back edge. When you get close to the edge. You will carefully loop your thread around the page edge and push the needle back through the hole.

Make sure you don't pull too tightly as you can rip the paper or crimp it.

Continue stitching as normal.

It creates a wonderful effect on your page. Here is a close up of the edge.

Handstitching has become a favorite way for me to add accents to my page. Sometimes I use a little:

and sometimes I use a lot:

With Rainbow Popcorn. I wanted to create the look of clouds on the top portion of the page. So I used a cloud stencil. I drew clouds all over the page, then used my paper piercer at intervals. It took awhile to stitch this page, but I feel it was worth it.

* Get the Buggy is Sketch Inspiration # 136, Sketches for you August SGOTM color challenge. Products used are Crate Paper Brooke Collection, K and Company Ancestry paper ribbon and a handmade rose.

*RainBow Popcorn is the sample for my August be Inspired  project at Sketches for you. I used Sassafrass and DCWV papers. the ribbon is from the fabric store. The title is made with Colorbok Punch Out Alphas. I added Diamond stickles and glossy accents to the letters.

Don't forget...if you make a project with a flower, submit it to Scrap our Stash.

Flowers Everywhere!

  Flowers have been such a big trend, that it's no surprise they are popping up all over the place at CHA. What's a girl to do when she can't buy all of the pretty flowers out there? Learn to make her own of course! There are a lot of advantages to making your own flowers. The main one being that you can customize it to fit your page. That's a big plus when your main topic of interest is a little boy. I have always admired the flowers but really don't always want girly looking pages.

Recently, I took the fabulous flowers class at Scrapbook Challenges. It was a great class! I could do everything at my own pace and I learned how to make 6 different flowers.I highly recommend the classes there and am looking forward to taking some more! Here are a few samples of things I made:

These were my first handmade flowers. I used crepe paper and buttons.

I did not make the small red flowers. I did make the white daisies with red crepe paper. This was for several July challenges at Sketches for you. The materials used on the lay out are K and company and Making memories.

I made these roses for the MS. Scraptastic 2010  Competition using crepe paper. I cut the leaves on my cricut, then used a bone folder to crease them. I inked them, folded them and sewed them to the page. The PP used is all Basic grey.

Then, to my delight, Club CK hosted a one hour challenge involving another flower technique. I love the flower, though I do find it a bit bulky in my album.

These were made using Crate Paper lemongrass papers and some buttons from my stash.

To learn how to make this fab flower, check out the video at Club CK. BTW, I didn't have all of the supplies they asked for in the video, but still managed to make the flower. The one thing I wished I would have had was the spritz to dampen the paper and make it easier to work with.

I hope you will decide to try out some handmade flowers of your own. If you do, there is a great challenge over at Scrap our Stash for August. Even if your flower isn't handmade, they would love to see you flower embellished pages. So please go check them out...and stay tuned to the blog for more of my hand made flowers.

New Sassafrass line at CHA

For everyone watching for the winner of my blog candy from the blog hop...stay tuned. it shall be posted shortly.

Head on over to the  Sassafrass' blog to check out their newest CHA release. I love the color and look of this new line. But then again who does not love anything Sassafrass.

Recently, I even used some Sassafrass scraps and leftover packaging to make a journal tag. I had just finished up a package of In Stitch Blossoms.


 I realized it was the perfect size for a tag. I covered the logo with a sticker and fussycut some flowers. I made a flower out of a bottle cap and some ribbon scraps. I filled the center with beads and glossy accents. It was a fun easy way to recycle! This is just one of the great challenges over at Sketches for you.

Tip: use smaller beads to fill the center so there are no gaps. I realized my error after the fact. The ribbon is folded and pleated around the bottle cap base. I used glue dots as I went which makes things a lot easier.

Diary of a Tadpole

While I did not make it to round two of the last Scrapper Standing contest at Memorable Seasons, I decided to keep participating for a chance to win a gift certificate. Challenge two asked for us to use a black cardstock base and to make at least two handmade flowers. I immediately thought of water lilies. My son and I had found some tadpole eggs...which we promptly brought home in an empty water bottle. Currently, the little guys have hatched and are growing at a wonderfully steady rate. I have been taking photos along the way with the intent to document their stay in our home. This will be the title page for those layouts. I liked the idea of a black background. The photos seem striking against it.

I made the lily pads by cutting circles of various sizes. I cut out a little wedge, giving them the appearance of pac man. I then used my bone folder to crease them. I felt this gave the appearance of leaf veins. I folded the edges of the circle and inked them with colorbox olive ink. I then used various green chalks to add a little variable color to the leaf and to accent the veins. For the tadpole eggs, I used glossy accents and black pony beads. To make the flowers, I cut them on my cricut. They come in two pieces. I rolled up the edges of the top layer and inked them with colorbox ruby satin and royal silk ink. These were the closest colors to the actual flowers we saws and added more depth to the paper flowers. I rolled crate paper sweet branch trim for the centers.
  The title was cut on my cricut. I used CK's sloppy and beantree fonts. The tadpole egg "o" was made from a chipboard alpha. I flipped it over to the white back, added the button and used glossy accents. I am looking forward to making little tadpoles and frogs for the rest of the pages. Stay tuned for those.

I have also decided to post my first project for Last Scrapper standing round one here. The theme was "An American Child." We were asked to use star and stripes. I cut the stars on my cricut...some of which I creased and glued down to add dimension. To help the star hold it's crease, I glued cotton ball pieces inside. The striped ribbon was purchased from the dollar section of target. I chose to keep this LO very simple. I journaled inside a star on my word processor and added it to the border. I added a few small star brads and  buttons.