Utilising that Stash!

Not that I have a lot in my stash ;) or that maybe you might call me a 'collector' of papers, grin :)  Just don't tell my husband!
I was going through my stash, organising things, as you do ;) and came across some old Basic Grey - they were one of my first loves in scrapbooking.  BUT I discovered while re-organising the stash that those papers I just couldn't bear to use because they were too beautiful, just didn't hold that same degree of love anymore.  Tastes change I guess, and the scrapbooking industry has evolved so much since I first started card making back in 2001!

So, this little cutie is my great-nephew, on Christmas Day just chilling while we had a family photo shoot.  The papers are a mixture of Nordic Holiday and Marrakech from Basic Grey.  I mixed it all up with chipboard from Dusty Attic and 2 Crafty, and chipboard stickers from Echo Park.  Distress Oxides created the background with some random stamping.  To get my creativity cranking into gear, I used one of the sketches, and the mood board, from Dusty Attic.

Distress Oxides are my latest go to, I love how easy they blend together!  This card uses Victorian Velvet, Fossilized Amber, and Abandoned Coral.  The background die is from Lawn Fawn and the stamps are from Altenew.

My last card uses scraps of bittersweet from Basic Grey, left over from a mini album I made for my work's Valentines Day Raffle.  This card is just layers, layers layers, its really quite simple.  4 different Memory Box Dies, with some Scrapinec chipboard, paper straws and flowers from Green Tara.

For some reason, despite trying to save these cards multiple times they ended up with the top and bottoms chopped off!  SO ANNOYING!!  however, it did feel great utilising some of those old papers :)

I have to say a big THANK YOU to my wonderful friend Francine, she's given my blog a bit of revamp for me :) What do you think?  I love it! <3

Have a great weekend :)

Its always nice to be acknowleged :)

At the beginning of last year, I had another one of those dreams come true moments when I applied for Blue Fern Studios design team.  Like most of you I was gutted when they closed, and then absolutely stoked to see the company return! :)
For the last few weeks the new owners have been doing blog posts thanking the individual members of the 2018 design team, before they announce who the new team is.  Heres the link to mine, love that they picked one of my favourite OTP projects to showcase :) :)

In case you're wondering ;) I did not apply this time round.
See you again soon!

This and That.........................................

2019.  how did that sneak up so fast? and its already nearly the end of January!  I remember as a child hearing that time goes fast the older you get, and obviously my young self would have thought that was weird.  Little did I know how accurate it was!



You may be wondering where Ive been since my last post.  Its been a while.  Or you may not ;)  the end of 2018 absolutely sucked for us, it was a tough time but Im happy to say the light has well and truly shown at the end of the tunnel!  :)  So, what happened?  In August our beloved exotic mongrel ;) <3 Dougal got diagnosed with a tumour on his liver.  By the time they found it, and he started having symptoms, it was 6cm and we were told we had 3-6 more months with him.  The following month my mother-inlaw developed Atrial Fibrillation, and in the following 6 weeks had four admissions to hospital before it was under control.  In the same month our beautiful McKenzie - the 2nd of our exotic mongrels ;) - was diagnosed with a brain tumour and we lost her two weeks later.  Eight weeks later we lost Dougal.  To say we were heart broken seems not enough.  Its bad enough losing one of our dogs, let alone two, and so quickly.  There was no scrapping.  I just didn't feel like it.  Too much stress in too short a time definitely takes a toll!

Around Christmas I finally felt like creating again, and made some layouts as gifts, and Christmas stockings for name places at Christmas dinner.

One of favourite companies, 49 and Market <3 I love the fussy cut-ability of their papers!  This one uses their dimensional stickers with Cottage Life collection, still one of my favourite paper collections, and the large chipboard piece is from Dusty Attic.

This piece was a little different for me, its uses 7 Dots paper and pieces from the cut outs.  Chipboard this time is from Blue Fern Studios.  That big word is from Robbie Bell - I purchased this at SENZ a few years ago, its wood and embossed beautifully!

The last layout is again 49 and Market, this time the chipboard is 2 Crafty.  The paper is again Cottage Life and Ive also used the dimensional stickers again too.



So Christmas place names.  These were actually supposed to be banners.  They're from Kaisercraft, and I thought they would make awesome place tags.  The bamboo names at the top of each stocking came from Love From Seventeen - they come plain and Ive embossed them gold, they're actually supposed to be used as name tags for presents but I changed it up a bit ;)  The paper this time is a really old BoBunny collection, Noel - one of my favourite Christmas collections, love the colours!

This is mine.  The Burgundy paper was actually plain so to shoosh it up a bit I used a BoBunny stickable stencil and their gold glitter paste.  The cluster at the top  was created out of fussy cutting some of the holly and punching out some leaves with a new Holly punch I had from Stampin Up.




Lastly, did you know I have a facebook page where I pop all my projects, with details on how I created them?  You can find it here.
Everything also is added to my Pinterest page, and you can find that here.

Happy New Year Everyone!, see you soon :)