Yummy Pumpkiny Goodness....

Since moving to Aus I have been lucky to discover Purple Pumpkin- a mother and daughter team of awesomeness who create scrapbooking embellishments and the sell them via a monthly (or so) sale on their blog. I just managed to find out in time to grab some cool stuff in their October sale. You have to be fast I had my order in within 13 minutes and still missed out on a couple of things I was keen on.

Today they are running a super duper giveaway hence the motivation for this post happening today specifically- but I can tell you that I would have blogged about them eventually and will be sure to do so again in the future- once I finally get photos to paper because their stuff is good, nay excellent.... actually superb! Go check them out....

Did you see?

What Tim Holtz and Jennifer McGuire did?

Wow!!
Go check out the links so you can see the details!
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Cybercrop Challenges

Each month on the Scrapbooking Yahoo Group I am on we have a Cyber Crop. This is where as many of us as possible 'get together' and scrap over the weekend at our own places. We send emails through to encourage and enquire. And we share what we are working on. Sometimes there are prizes as well. Each month it's my job to set the challenges for the Cyber Crop.

This month I chose Scrapbooking inspired by the ages. The aim is to scrap some pages that have been inspired by some small facet of the Era's I set. It can come across in the story, photos, supplies, design, colour scheme or anything else any one can imagine.

Here are the era's I chose...

Pre-history

Ancient Egypt

Art Deco

The 60's

The 70's

The 80's

Feel free to join in!! And link up to your results in the comments. I'll share mine later in the week or so... if I find the time to get them done!
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Challenge Day 6; Wreath

I was lead by Julie FFB who often serves up some great inspiration on her blog to this little piece of inspiration which is made by this talented Chickadee! Our wreath at home was mine before I ever met Les or had the kid twinkles in my eyes I overhauled it a little last year but it was a bit like flogging a dead something! So inspired I made this....

1. I cut the top you can see here down the sides into two pieces.
2. Stitched the top of the back onto the bottom of the front.
3. Brought a $10 wreath base from Spotlight.
4. Asked the love of my life to use some of his amazing adhesive stash to cover the wreath in batting.
5. Carefully draped my length of fabric around the wreath.
6. Pinned the open end in place to ensure a good overlap under my button's- it was quite long enough so I cut a little salvage off and placed it behind the buttons so you can't see the white.
7. Then I pulled the pieces together and carefully hand stitched it up.
   

I am really pleased with the end result....

Although I'm not sure if it's 100% done I may add some metal, fabric or paper flowers (or some combo of all 3) at some point in the future. Something like this....



If you want more wreath inspiration check out these!

♥

Challenge Day 1: Rosette Decoration

It's only once it gets dark that you realise your photo is weird!!! Because then it's too late to take another one. This is my effort for day 1 of Paula's 24 days of Christmas Creating Challenge. I've been wanting to try my hand at rosettes for a while it is both harder and easier than I thought.
This one is made with three different Basic Grey papers, some pearl beads a droplet 'crystal' one black brad, foam tape and some nice thread for hanging. And obviously I used a couple of scallop punches.

The easy part is that they are quick and simply to make. The hard part is that there needs to be a width to length ratio and you need to accurately fold it in half. Mine is at all accurate and I went through a trial and error process with the l x w ratio. The length on the green one was way to long for the width of my paper so I needed to keep trimming sections off. On the one below the length was too short so my concertinas are a bit too spread and my middle very bunched!

That said I like this one and hope to do another with the same paper and actually finish it with some sort of centrepiece! I downloaded the paper from a site with sheet music for Christmas carols each carol had a sweet old fashioned picture to match! You can find them here.

♥

Happy Halloween

I've been doing a bit of blog surfing lately and came across some cool Halloween stuff. We don't do Halloween- there's something just plain wrong about going around and demanding lollies from strangers. But that said the opportunity to play around and make some fun stuff was just too hard to resist.....

For the teachers, thee bat candy covers are from Skip to my Lou (some seriously cool stuff on there, have a look around). The labels are from Love Manor. There's Hershey bars under there. The Devil and the Spider are from Owlsorts see link below....

These are for the kids and me you can find all the details on Owlsorts....

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Finished!

I finished off the Jessica Sprague Course (Yay me, finally!) Here's the results of lessons 11, 12, 13 and 14 and a couple of off shoots of them....

Before...

After....

Not sure if I like the full colour or black and white better there???

I love that last one!!!! I am wondering about translating it to a canvas somehow???
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Sprague Lesson 10

Yay! Finally getting back to these lessons- Les is gone for the weekend so I have the computer to myself guilt free! I have just done another 3 of these lessons... would like to finish them all up but it is already 1:41am! (I had to finish The Goblet of Fire before I started!). So I am off to bed to read the next HP book by torch light till I can no longer keep my eyes open!

Before.....

After...

I love this photo it is one of the first I took with the DSLR when we first got it- cool huh??

Les didn't do the journalling for last weeks 365 yet so I think I'll just do it later today... I can't handle waiting sometimes it's hard enough to remember what I did this morning let alone a week ago!

♥

Lesson 8

I am almost caught up now in the Lessons for Photo Editing: Frame-Ups & Special Effects at Jessica Sprague. No 8 was adding text to photos nothing new here for me but more chances to play with, my new love, textures!

I'm not happy with the text colour down the bottom but for the life of me couldn't find anything better. The quote is one from Robert Fulghum (never heard of him) that I have corrupted for my own purpose. You can see the actual quote here.

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Tonights This Mornings Sprague-ing

I did lesson 4 & 5 today from Jessica Spragues course. Masks and Textures; Masks I knew already. Textures are the new love of my life! My example photos (the test subjects) weren't the best choices I look forward to cuddling up to photoshop and doing a little experimenting again sometime soon. For now though I need to go to bed.

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Check out Hero Arts this week...

There's big stuff happening on the Hero Arts Website this week they are having a big relaunch... check it out! Start on their Blog

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Willy Clown style

I am doing Jessica Sprague's Frame-up's and Special Effects Course and just finally getting down to doing the lessons (I was 8 days behind, now I am only 5). She set a project and here's my result... with a bit of humour thrown in!

I don't think you can join the class now but have a look at her free tutorials. I've had 3 photoshop epiphany's since I started... it's been worth it just for that.

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A friend in need...

This is the cover for an 8x8 album...

So one of the lovely ladies in an internet group I am a part of is in need of a bit of cheering up at the moment so we made it a challenge to make her an album between us. These are mine and Kieley's pages....

These two are Kieley's..... cool huh?

This is the end page....

Even cooler is that one of the ladies in the group is compiling it all for us then dropping it around- Thanks Libby!!

And also seriously cool is that Anna from Anna's Craft Cupboard donated an album for us- sweet!

♥