A Cause for Celebration

As I have mentioned here previously, I have been working on an album for some friends who married last year. Unfortunately, I have only managed hasty snaps of the pages as they are too large to scan in and I have yet to ask my resident expert to photograph them for me.

This page is quite masculine deliberately because it features the groom's sons. I wanted to lighten it slightly with an injection of my theme colours, so I chose to add texture and colour at the same time with lots of different ribbons. I tied the colours in again with flocking on all of the stamped areas (stamps from Stampin' Up!). The scalloped edge paper is from Papermania. The celebrate wording is printed onto Safmat from Letraset and the paper behind the photograph is from Papermania's capsule collection. It isn't clear on my poor photo, but I have embossed around the image and around the medallion stamp which adds detail without clutter.

I would like to submit this layout as an entry into Crafty Ribbons' challenge this week. They have a great prize of an autumnal tones ribbon bundle, which I would love to win and use of my humble crafting projects.

Embellish Me More

This week's challenge at Crafty Emma's is titled 'Embellish Me More' - a challenge to use at least 4 types of embellishments in a papercraft project. My submission is a 12 x 12 scrapbook page, part of an album I have been making for some friends to celebrate their wedding.

The whole album is based on a theme of black, white and claret. The embellishments I have used have mostly been made by me throughout all the pages. I started by using Photoshop to convert the colour photo to black and white then hand colouring the bouquet using Twinkling H2Os. I overlaid vellum which I patterned with superfine holes around the outline of the bouquet. I attached it using small brads. I cut a scalloped border from white paper and embellished it with tiny claret gems. A vellum sentiment accent was added to the side of the photo and a little bird (Stampin' Up!) on a branch punched from black card to highlight the top right over a scalloped mini page. I made a simple white parchment craft border for the left hand side and a mini version of a wedding dress, also from parchment which I hung on a little hanger that I twisted from purple wire. The page was finished off with a white rub-on title 'beautiful'.

Although the overall effect is quite simple, the parchment work took a long time, so the whole page actually took 12 hours! I am pleased with it though, so it was worth the effort.

Jellypark Challenge ~ Gettin' Punchy

I have only just discovered that illustrator and artist Claire Keay has opened her own online store selling her beautiful hand drawn digi stamps, watercolours, cards and other beautiful goodies. Jellypark is full of inspirational images for all kinds of papercrafting. I have previously bought some of her digi images through CraftsUPrint, but only realised that she had opened her own store when I saw one of her adorable stamps being used by a Polkadoodles design team member.

Having seen her gorgeous store, I hopped on over to the Jellypark challenge blog to have a nosey around. This week's challenge is to use any stamped image combined with punched or die cut elements. I am entering my 'gumball hearts' card into the challenge. The card uses 5 punches and 4 stamps, but has quite a clean and simple look to it.

I started by making a white layer from plain old photocopier paper using Martha Stewart two-step punch around the page. I cut a rectangle from Bazzill Bling and rounded the corners with an EK Success corner punch before stamping the gumball machine with a three piece stamp from Stampin' Up! I cut an aperture with a Woodware scalloped circle punch and fitted a treat cup in the space. I made lots of little heart-shaped sweeties by stamping and punching them out before layering them together with sticky pads. The card was then layered up and finished with the addition of a metal heart tab on the top and a piece of knotted spotty teal cololured ribbon from Anita's crafts.

I am looking forward to getting my copy of Claire's Jellypark newsletter which I know will be packed full of inspirational ideas to make good use of her beautiful artwork.