The Counterfeit Kit Results

In all honesty I did intend to post these before now but you know how it is, life gets in the way and suddenly another month is almost over. Still I am here now with a mega post featuring all of the layouts I made with my Shimelle inspired conterfeit kit as featured in my last blog post. The only supplies I used in addition to the kit were an additional sheet of cardstock and some other alpha stickers after my attempt at altering the title for one page went wrong.

We start the tour with Himself attempting to skim stones on a lovely little river in Scotland.

These birds are just some of the many species who fly free in the tropical house at Chester Zoo. I used the left over strip from one of my border punches on this LO and journalled using the picket fence Distress Marker. That thing is so strange, I never realised that the colour developed rather than going on white.

Another LO from the zoo this time a double so that I could include lots of photos, as a result this is a very simple LO with only a little paper for embellishment.

Gwen is the name that came with my much beloved Wolseley Hornet when we bought her last year (a Wolseley Hornet in case you are wondering is a posh version of an original Mini - that is very much how they were originally marketed). She is Mini sized (with a slightly sticking out back end LOL) and an absolute gem to drive although I have to fight Himself for the privilege!

I am the subject of the next page in a sixteenth century style headdress at Stirling Castle. Ok so the dress up room was really intended for children but I have a thing about hats so I just had to try one or two on.
On a more scrappy note I just fell in love with the blue Sassafrass paper with the feathers whilst working with this kit.

Himself again and an almost willing pose (he couldn't really escape as we were on a boat in the middle of a Scottish Loch at the time). I had great fun with this one layering the stickers and punched shapes.

I took lots of pictures of Lochs while we were in Scotland and just loved this one of the salt marsh at the end of Loch Long. I liked how the greys and kraft went with the colours in the photo and just added a touch of brighter blue to add impact to the photo.
This was the LO that needed additional alphas. Having coloured my white alphabet stickers for the previous three LOs I decided to get clever and tried altering it with distress embossing powder in Weathered Wood. It worked but they just didn't work how I wanted them too so I changed them for some simple black stickers.

Finally we have the first LO I completed with the kit. I love the bright yellow with the blue backing and think that this photo of Loch Lomond on a cold March morning works well with it.

So there we have it a total of 8 LOs made from my kit and because I made myself work with it until it was gone I actually got all of that done in less than a week, definitely the way for me to go where kits are concerned.
My next project is an album for MILs 70th birthday at the start of August, I have some wonderful photos to work with and will hopefully be able to share a few peeks on here as I go.

A little Counterfeiting

It has been a long time since I played along with the Counterfeit Kit Challenge but this month I wanted to have a go especially as it was inspired by Shimelle Laine.

So I got busy with the contents list and came up with this.

 My papers are a mix of Bella Blvd Mr Boy, My Minds Eye Kraft Funday and Sassafrass Ellie's tale

Cardstock from Bazzill, Core-dinations and Papermania (Kraft)

My Alphas are by Making Memories and Papermania. I've got a selection of brads (in the tub) for my old embellishment; Label stickers, pearls and trims for my embellishments; a random selction of journalling spots; my Boofle buttons for my something else and a Pink Paislee tape. The stamp sets are a frame set and a border set neither of which I have really used. I haven't added anything messy but might add in a paint dabber, only might!

I am also tempted to put together an add-on based on Alphas simply because I do love my Alphas, we shall see. Oh and I've not thought of a name for it, suggestions would be welcome. I'll be back once I've done something with it.

Bright Eyes

Yes I know what the song is about but it just really fit with this photo, that's my excuse and I am sticking to it!

This layout is page number 65 of 2012, I know that because I have just added the total up in response to a message board discussion. And it has been hanging around on my desk for an absolute age, well ok several weeks. It started life as a way to showcase a stamped image that I coloured at craft club. I got it home looked at it for a few days and decided that the image was just too colourful, I'd selected the papers to highlight but that's how it goes some times.
The image was removed and replaced with the same one but coloured only in tones of brown. And that is how it stayed until this afternoon when I finally admitted that I just couldn't come up with a photo or page idea that went with the image (one of the Michael Powell Urban stamps by DoCrafts).
So once again I removed the stamped image and added the left-hand piece of the striped paper to cover up the mess. I still needed a photo but a quick trawl revealled this lovely big picture of Willow that I'd had printed but never used. Suddenly I could see where the page was going. A little trimming to remove some of the background, a Thickers title and a embellishment clustered made with some punched squares and a peel off butterfly altered with my black promarker and suddenly it was done.

I love that her wonderful eyes are very much the big feature of the LO and think that the black and kraft colour scheme works perfectly. The papers are both Graphic45, first time I've ever used this brand and it won't be the last.

Grandad's Greenhouse

So at long last I have returned to the land of the blogger, I'm not about to bother you with the reasons for my absence such as they are they are boring but I am going to launch straight in with a layout.

I am currently really off cardmaking and so where possible I try to scrapbook with the materials I am given at Craft Club every week. Yesterday I was successful and this is the result.

The materials we were given were from the Boofle range by Papermania (he's the character in the bottom right corner) and I decided that I really wanted to do something with the blue and brown colour combination (the shaped patterned piece is actually a card blank). I added core-dinations cardstock, kraft paper, ribbon and letter stickers and this is the result.

The photo is of me and my younger brother back in the summer of 1988 and as I started to write my journalling I realised that to me the real star of the photo was in the background; my grandad's greenhouse. It couldn't have been there all that long when this photo was taken, before that the spot had ben used to house their little caravan when it was home and before that I don't recall what was there. However for a good decade or more the greenhouse stood just behind the house and produced the most wonderful crops of tomatoes and cucumbers. I think about it every time I smell the scent you only get from freshly picked tomatoes and it is one of the reasons why I grow my own little crop even though himself doesn't like raw tomato.
The house was on the left just out of shot, that greenhouse really was squished in, and to the right was a drop down to the rest of the garden. Two or three steps took you down with a rockery on either side. Well we called it a rockery, really it was just two steep banks covered in the purple and white flowered varieties of a plant called rock. Beyond the drop on the right was grandad's shed, I think at that point it would have been two sheds joined together and it was a place both intriguing and out of bounds to little people. I never quite knew what grandad did in there but he had lots of tools and the like, I learnt later that he did metalworking in there making parts for vintage cars and suchlike. Past the shed and on the other side of the path that ran to the end of the quite long garden was his vegetable patch. There were for a time a couple of old apple trees down there and I remember picking raspberries and blackcurrants, but he grew all kinds of vegetables in amazingly neat rows. One of the nicest things when I was student at university was being sent back with a care parcel of produce from grandad's garden.
Of course it is all gone now. In his later years grandad couldn't manage the garden and now it's pretty much all covered with gravel, his sheds and the greenhouse have gone too. I like to think that a little bit of him lives on in my little vegetable patch though.

The photo was taken by nan, it's not of the best quality but I am so glad she gave it to me.  No doubt in front of the greenhouse just happened to be a convenient spot to have us stand. I had just finished primary school and had only been wearing glasses for a few months, heaven knows what I thought I looked like wearing those training shoes with that skirt! Steven's sweater would have been one that mom knitted herself. Amazing really how what was at the time just a snapshot of the grandchildren possibly taken to finish a film can trigger such memories. And if you have sat through my self indulgent whallowing you deserve a pat on the back!