Your couch or mine

There are some stamp sets that make me pull out my credit card without thinking, and this On my couch set  from PTI is one of those. Yum - I love the images, love the sentiments, love the possibilities.

Over at the chickensoup blog Clare chose this cool photo as inspiration. Have a look here.

Colours to die for, no doubt about that ... and also sporting that very cool ochre yellow I love so much  ... however, I didn't take inspiration from the colours but rather from the sofa's themselves and I thus present to you ... this card.

I had a lot of fun making this card, especially creating the wooden strip floor. Believe it or not, that is simply inked sections created with post-it notes as a mask. To make it a bit more realistic I created a one-point perspective using a vanishing point and then drew my lines down from that point.

Polka dots

I love all things dotty, and the new challenge on the Passion for Papertrey blog is ... of course, polka dots.

This card uses the PTI polka dot background stamp and vintage cream ink, but the little owls are from Hero Arts. I bought these owls so long ago and hardly used them. Seeing as I had both a large and small stamp I reckon they are just perfect for a mama owl and little bably owlet. New Baby sentiment is Stampin' Up!

How-to

Following on from Fridays post I thought I would add a little how-to, one of the tricks I use often to create overlapping elements

See on this layout how the text overlaps the photo ... yes? Well of course that is easy to do on a digital layout, but a bit more tricky on paper unless you add the text as stickers or die cuts. Because I printed the text on my layout first and then added the photo afterwards, there is no way to overlap the letters ... so this is what I do

I lay my photo in the right place onto the layout and lightly mark in pencil where the photo overlaps the lettering. I then carefully cut around the ovelapping part of the letters and then slip the photo underneath them.

This way I still get that poster graphic look with minimal effort on my part.

I do this with patterned paper too sometimes, like on the leaves on the left side of this layout below.

Chickensoup challenge #8

It's Friday night and another Chicken soup recipe night. This week we have used an album cover that I chose as inspiration. I have a bit of a thing for text and fonts and loved this funky higgledy piggledy font and the bold colours used.

Sometimes I like to focus on something other than the photo on a scrapbook layout, and for this layout I definitely wanted the words to stand out. My eldest daughter, who is on the Autistic Spectrum, was not always very verbally demonstrative as a little girl, so when she came out with this saying one night it was absolutely adorable.

Obviously inspired by the Guess how much I love you book, I love that she put her own spin on the famous quote from the book. Heaven is much cooler than the moon after all.

See what the other cooks have done and come play along :)

Another boy card

My friend asked me yesterday if I could do her a quick card for one of the aquafit instructors she works with who is leaving. She said he is hanging up his "mankini" and moving on to another job and that is what she would like the card to say.

Love that word ... mankini. I guess when you work with a bunch of woman all the time you sort of become one of the gang. Swimming shorts just doesn't have the same ring to it.

I had to make this quickly, didn't have any suitable stamps or clipart so just drew a pair of swimming trunks, grunged the edges up a little with distress inks and added some computer generated wording and a few stamped flourishes.

Very simple, but I like simple for man cards.

Edited to add: I was just browsing some of my fave blogs ... mainly because I have to go ironing now and that is not really getting me fired up in the motivation department. Went onto the passion for Papertrey blog and saw this great man card by Aimes. LOVE it and just had to share.

Back home from hols

We have just returned home from two fabulous weeks in France, staying near Evian and overlooking Lake Geneva (or more precisely Lac Leman) from a cottage in the mountains.

As good as it sounds. Honestly, I would move here tomorrow if I could.

So sad to be back in the real world, but life alas has to go back to washing, ironing and entertaining the kids for the remainder of the summer.

On a crafty note, I missed two weeks of chicken soup and thought I would share my layout for recipe #5 

Like everyone who lives within an acceptable travel radius of London, we too went on the hunt for the elephants scattered around the city. This recipe was the perfect fit for those elephant photos. I do love multi photo layouts, and I like to keep them pretty simple. Just lots of photos.

I made this into a two pager so that I could cram in even more photos. This is what is looks like with both pages together.