Tales of a Craft Class Junkie: September's Class Schedule

The first week of September  has come and gone so quickly! I'm wrapping up a few classes and I have a few new ones starting, I thought I would share what I would be up to this month.

I am finishing up a few projects for the gesso class at the Art Studio. I have learned a lot, but I think I am going to have to go back and review a few things.I need a little more practice and playtime. Overall, I loved the class and am using things I never thought I would on my layouts. I find that, after I take a class, I need to use the techniques I have learned for about a month.Some will become a part of my routine while others I may discard as just something I experimented with.

Currently, I am trying to decide which class to take next from the Art Studio.There are quite a few selections!

This month's seminar at Masterful Scrapbook Design features the use of various Trends. I am looking forward to discovering why something becomes trendy as well as seeing if there are any new trends that I have not yet used on my layouts.

I had a gift certificate left over for Big picture classes.So I decided to take Kit- tastic with May Flaum. I am not really certain that I need help with making kits. I mainly took the class because I enjoy the classes May teaches. Plus, she always manages to surprise me with at least one or two things that I could be doing with my supplies.

I am really excited about this class. I am almost done with my reading assignment.Just a few more days until it starts! I think there might be a seat or two left if you'd like to join in. I am really curious to learn more about myself and how other's perceive my layouts. You can check it out at the Get It Scrapped classroom.


I will be checking in throughout the month, sharing my classroom experiences and some of my projects. Maybe I will see some of you in the classroom!

A pair of Boy's Shorts, part 1

  The shorts were ripped. Worn thin from frequent use, they were, at this point, beyond repair. Maybe some moms would be sad, but I saw an opportunity. Here in my hand was some of the coveted fabric appearing on scrapbook pages everywhere. Now, despite being on a limited budget, I had some fabric to use on my own pages. It might not be brightly patterned...but perhaps, I could change that with a little creativity. Perhaps, I thought, this one pair of boys shorts could go a long way. So here they are in their wrinkled glory, ready to use:

one very wrinkled, beat up pair of my son's shorts

I felt kind of lucky that they were khakis. I think it will make them easier to find uses for. I can envision myself cutting away the pockets, stamping on some of the spaces with paints, or using strips to make masculine looking flowers. There are a ton of possibilities.  Possibility number one was a simple one indeed. I noticed the drawstrings on the shorts were the right colour to be used as trim on a page that I was working on.

         Cathy Z sketch and journal spot, October Afternoon papers,
                              salvaged trim, Jillibean soup flowers-red with BG brads and misc. buttons,
            Maya road flowers- check, October afternoon checked alphas,
Cosmo cricket tiny type alphas

This was not an easy page for me to make. First of all, I had challenged myself to use up more of the patterened paper in my stash. I also endeavored to use up some cardstock scraps. That was not the hard part though. This is a page from the Cathy Zielske design your life series at BPC. The idea being to step into Cathy's simple style so that you learn more about page composition and design. Once upon a time, I was a more simple scrapper. Now I find myself reaching for paint, and though I do like how this page turned out, I am still thinking I should have splattered it up somewhere or somehow.
  Regardless of how hard page one might have been for me to complete, I still had page two to work with. I also had just one piece left of the drawstring trim. So I sort of replicated page one's design. The  drawstring

  

made for the perfect trim for both pages. Now, I still have quite a lot left of the shorts to use up. I can not promise you that will happen right away. I scrap where creativity takes me. I do promise to share the pages I do when I do use up those shorts...so stay tuned. 

Battery Powered?

  I homeschool my son and one of our favourite subjects is science. I tend to hoard science kits like I hoard scrapbook supplies. So my son and I made a commitment to not bring any more home until we used some kits up. This kicked off some good fun in our home, though I must admit, some of those kits were duds. As in...duds, not working, it's a no go. This was one such kit. Maybe the citrus was too old to conduct a charge.( we live on an island and it's shipped in). Maybe we had the wrong kind of penny or paper clip. Who knows!?!? We never got the light to come on using oranges and lemons as batteries. We still  had a great time and managed to learn about electricity. I took a bunch of photos for me to scrap which meant I not only used up a science kit, I used up stash too. It was a win-win all around.

Sketch from Cathy Zielske
Jillibean soup papers, stickers
Webster's pages sparklers
Twinery Twine- cappucino
glossy accents
star punch
DMC floss
Glimmer mist- Electric blue
Maya Mist- Creme Metallic
Pink paislee alphas

  Can you tell what's new on my page? Probably not. No hard feelings about that. It's hard to tell unless you know. I got Adobe Photoshop elements 10. I must say that it has helped me out quite a bit in the "having better photos" category. I still need to learn to take better pictures, but at least the ones I have look a tad better. I also used a large photo on my page thanks to the Cathy Zielske Design your life class at Big picture Classes. It's not something I would normally do. There is one other new thing on my page...I finally got around to weaving.
  Initially, I had just stitched boxes on the right hand page to even out the design.After stitching the boxes, I thought it needed a bit more than just a plain box with mist droplets in it. I was, sadly, too lazy to stitch a whole pattern inside the box. If I had planned things out, I would have evenly aligned the holes to make the weaving easier. So the weaving is a bit uneven. No matter, it turned out to look pretty interesting. I added some punched stars with a bit of glossy accents and ended up with some nice texture on my page. Here is a close up:

I wove the threads at random through various strands of the thread. It created this lovely pattern through the block. Proof positive that trying something new can yield a wonderful result.

So now it's your turn. Try a new tool, a new technique...anything new will do. Then share it with us at Scrap Our Stash!

You Have...

  For awhile now, I have been wanting to do a page about my son's characteristics. We always tell him things like " you have mommy's nose and Daddy's eyes." So, while we were waiting in the car for his swim lessons, I snapped off some photos of his hands, feet, and other features. I created this page based on a project at Big Picture Scrapbooking.

I used Some glimmer mist in tiger lily and patina to splatter the background onto the white cardstock. The flowers are prima's e-line as are the blue jewels. The patterned papers are crate paper and cosmo cricket. I used a very old fiskars punch. For the title, I used black cardstock to add a shadow effect and to highlight it. I journaled about his personality traits and who he gets some of those from and then on the photos, I added journal strips about where his physical characteristics came from.

jump for Joy: a recipe challenge

Recipe challenge can be...well, a challenge. That is the fun in them though...and they are a great way to use up you stash. Frosted currently has one underway. As I perused the ingredients list, I realized that the page I had just made using Scrapbook challenges sketch #212 fit the bill.

Lets see: bird(check),ribbon(check), felt flowers( that marks of two ingredients),buttons(check), and glitter(in the form of stickles). I believe that covers it! 6 ingredients! YES! There were 10 to choose from. perhaps you should head on over and see the list for yourself.

Meanwhile, I am a firm believer in combining challenges. So going through my challenge notebook, I realize I can also submit this page to:
                                             Big picture Scrapbooking for the "I Live" challenge today
                                             Scrapbook Challenges August color challenge
                                             Club Creating keepsakes Scrap your stacks challenge
                                             Sketches for you: Brenda's Fall colors challenge
                                             Challenge masters:go green inspiration challenge

being organized means being able to track and submit my work for a variety of challenges while still getting lots of pages done. I find I am creating more a lot more. So go get organized  and see just what you can come up with!

Another sketchy Thursday challenge-determined for Victory

  So here I am again...I love these sketches. I can see the sketch and can visualize the photos and the pp. Suddenly, I'm off and the Lo comes together. Seems easy...though there are often hitches along the way. I saw the sketch for this week and visualized using my  Black orchid pad...that lovely set with all of those great paper patterns...which has been sitting unused for months waiting for the right photos. In 5 minutes flat, I had cut the PP and laid it out on the cardstock. Excited that it was going so fast, I then hit the first bump in the road. I had these great brads with letters from my stash. It would seem though that I lacked enough e's. I really wanted to title the Lo " Determined for Success" but after playing around with the thesaurus and the available letters( because I was determined to use them) I settled on "Determined for Victory." *It's a little hard to read them because the camera won't pick them up.

  So I am off and running again now. I decided to use this Lo as part of a journaling assignment for the Textuality class I am taking at Big Picture Scrapbooking. Here comes hitch 2... I played for an hour with the word processor trying to make the journaling "just so." In the end, I called it quits...deciding I liked what I had. So as usual, a fast Lo quickly turns into several hours of tweaking.

Ahh, the Lo...I made this about my son being determined to blow up a balloon and tie it. My husband had done one, so he figured he could. DS literally tried for hours! This from the Sketchy Thursday 5-6 Challenge. BTW, the font used is CK boutique and as mentioned above, the pp is SEI Black orchid, the letter brads are unknown.
And so, without further ado, the grand reveal:

And as usual, I made a 2 page lo: