Farmers' Filing Cabinets

I love Becky Fleck's page maps, and she has a competition on her blog that is open to scrapbookers worldwide this month (which doesn't often happen), so it was definitely time to enter! The Southern Girls challenge this fortnight is blue & brown, two colours I love together, so I decided to combine these two challenges and use some Kaisercraft paper I had just picked up that happened to be the right colours!

Originally I was going to do a layout about our day on the glacier at Franz Josef, but the colours in the photos didn't go with the papers at all! So, instead I opted for these photos. They are of beehives that we saw everywhere in our travels through the Otago region of New Zealand. While we were on our bicycle tour our guide joked that they weren't "farmers' filing cabinets" so that's where the title came from.

Anyway, without further ado, here is my layout.

And here's Becky's sketch.

This layout is kind of a hybrid layout I guess.

Instead of using paper for the middle square that the photo sits on, I used a photograph of the beehives in the field as the background. I typed the journalling and title directly onto the photo, then had it printed out on photographic paper. (Fonts are 'Marker Fine Point' [one of my favourites] for the journalling, and 'Hotel Coral Essex' for the title.) I attached the closeup photo using mounting tape.

Paper: Kaisercraft Prairie Lane collection

Pearls: Kaisercraft.

Ribbon: Brown velvet, and blue velvet rickrack both from inque ribbon

Pens: Sakura (I coloured directly over the title onto the background photograph.)

Tiny Alpha stickers: Kaisercraft (on the blue paper under the photograph)

Brads, buttons, floss from my stash.

Here are some closeup shots.

Till next time, happy days!

Francine

A Scrap Lift - Eco-rafting

Hello everyone. It's been a while since I posted, but we were in New Zealand for three weeks, so I think I had a good excuse, LOL! We had a fantastic time and now I have lots of pictures that I can scrapbook, although based on last year's trip that might not happen for quite a while!

Anyway, I recently received a copy of "the Complete Scrapbooking Handbook" through this offer. There was a layout in there (Sweetheart) by Missy Neal that I really liked. This is it (at the right):

I decided to use a picture from our trip, and the January monthly scrapbooking challenge kit from my LSS, Wrapped in Paper. I even remembered to take a picture of it too so you could see it before I cut it up. Want to see? Here it is.

I didn't really like that papers as I didn't think they really matched the bling cardstock. However, since the rules state that you have to use at least a little bit of everything in the kit, scraplifting this layout was perfect because I could use the papers I didn't like (the one with the rainbow particularly) very sparingly!

As well as using these papers, I also wanted to enter the Southern Girls challenge. This time it was to use some dry embossing somewhere, and since my in-laws (parents and sister) banded together to buy me a Big Shot for my birthday/Christmas I was dying to use it! So this is what I came up with:

I used a piece of the rainbow paper I disliked so much and embossed the back side of it. I rubbed some brown ink over it to make the embossing stand out. I did the same to the chipboard shape and was

pleasantly surprised to see that it worked too! The bird and branches on the right were made with my Stampin Up! two step bird punch. I added the rubons (the birds on the left, and butterfly and hearts on the right by Kaisercraft) from my stash. The only other thing not from the kit were the title letters. They are foam stickers by tim & tess. Originally they were a baby blue colour, but they just didn't match, see... so I took out my trusty Sakura stardust pens and recoloured them. Boy I love those pens - the ink flows so easily, you can easily colour large areas, and the bling they add is gorgeous! (If you've been reading my blog for any time, by now you might be thinking that Sakura is paying me to say these things, but really they're not. If they wanted to though, LOL ... I'd be open to it!)

I'll leave you with some close up shots.

On another happy note, when I took this entry in to Wrapped in Paper this week, I found out that I won last month's challenge with this layout! I haven't won a challenge there for ages so that was a very pleasant surprise. I'll pick up my prize when I pick up the layout at the end of the month.

In the meantime, if you're in Nicholls and feel like dropping in to Wrapped in Paper to vote for my entry this month, I'd appreciate it!

Till next time, happy days!

Francine