Scrapping with friends

Hello there

Last week I was invited to a friend's house to craft, chat and have a couple of drinks of .... hot chocolate?!!... naaaah, you'll never believe that..... wine :-)

I was supposed to be there at 7 so I was getting prepared well in advance at 6.45!! Tut tut at me. I knew which colours I wanted at that time but I didn't know which photos. Thankfully I very quickly decided on the Mother's Day ones, so I printed them off. As ever nothing ever goes smoothly; the settings on the printer were for basic print not photo print, so came out full of lines which isn't good. I sorted that out and just printed them off at 6x4in for ease.

I also printed off some things onto tissue paper (order from Sarah's cards and they give you your goods wrapped in white tissue paper - genius!). I've been watching Heidi Swapp's ustream recording for her Memory Files range. It's an excellent video which is an hour long and her style is relaxed yet professional. She inspires me. See Heidi's ustream page to watch it

I also printed off some papers from MyCraftStudio free download as Stephanie Weightman has moved to QVC and they supplied the Quintessentially Country Garden download as a sweetener to get people to watch. I love the papers as the colours are teal and brown (my faves at the moment). I can't find the page again I'm afraid but maybe they've withdrawn it.

Thankfully my craft tote was full of stuff, so that was quick and easy.

Thankfully also Catherine only lives round the corner but I went in the car as I took some lemon meringue pie with me too - maybe I was trying to bribe my friends to help me out but in all fairness only two of them could eat it for various reasons, yet they helped me anyway; that's good friends for you.

This is what it looked like when I left Catherine's. I didn't end up using the papers I'd printed off as they were A4, so didn't fit on the 12x12 card base I'd taken. Helen was kind enough to let me have that strip off some of her Stampin' Up papers. Helen also shared a layout suggestion on her fancy new phone. The 2012 and 'love this' pieces are from the Heidi Swapp free download I got from her blog. I used a strip of the white tissue and created a tassled look with it as I've enjoyed seeing that on several layouts. I should've coloured it first with the Stampin' Up Baja Breeze pad Catherine let me use but that would've been too easy :-). Jackie and I discussed how to make the tassle look clearer but I ran out of time at home basically (where the rest of the tissue paper was), so I had to leave it as it was. Jackie gave me the idea of putting something in that top right hand corner as it had looked bare. I thought she would put one of her nice doodles but she suggested using Mara's die using the same paper as my vertical strip. So I did and very happy with it I am. I had to lay the photos like that really as the middle photo has shadow over Mum and Maggie's legs, so this way hides that shadow.

When I got home I put some gorgeous blue glitter onto a button for the centre of the flower. I also used some thickers for the title 'Mother's day' and used my speckled egg and the Baja breeze stamp to colour them. On hindsight, I think that title could do with some sort of background to help it stand out more but hey ho, I've left it like it is now as time was against me at the time too. I wanted it finished that night to give me a sense of achievment.








On the excellent advice of Jackie, I did some 'flash' stamping on the page too. By that I mean not stamping carefully but just leaving vague imprints on the page. I chose a flower stamp for that and chose the same colours as the alphas. Another thing I did was put some basic doodling/shading around the photos and inked around the page too. The journalling went on last.

Take care out there