Chinese New Year!

This week's challenge at My Sheri Crafts is Chinese New Year! I had fun making this kanji and a Hello Kitty, and think they go together very nicely! The download for the character, which means "good luck" or "good fortune" follows at the end of this post, and I just used up scraps for the card. Happy Chinese New Year to you all, on February 3rd!

Hannah's Apples

Love this week's challenge, Organic, but usually when I'm eating it! A LO was a bit of a trick, so I made a page of my DD's tree:





Love the dimensionality of the embellishments!

Supplies:

Paper: DCWV Eco Stack
Martha Stewart stamps
Versamark and red embossing powder
Black Dew Drops
Letter stickers

Happy Birthday to me!

My Birthday was this past weekend, so I thought I'd show you a LO I created for a previous birthday party:



Bless her, my mum made that cake for me yearly until I was grown, and occassionally afterward. Pound cake,with a layer of whipped cream on top, then covered with tinned mandarins. I suppose those little oranges would have been quite the treat in 1976 Belfast, N. Ireland!





Supplies:
Cricut cartridges: Storybook and Graphically Speaking
Paper: solid cardstock and K&Co Wild Saffron
Liquid Pearls
ATG adhesive
matching brad
Colourbox ink pads
Martha Stewart "Happy Birthday" ribbon
Spellbinders: Blossom
Tattered Angels glitter mist: Sunflower

To make the grunge flower:
Use spellbinders to cut 4 different-sized flowers in coordinating cardstock. Mist lightly with water, then crumple together. Allow to dry slightly, then uncrumple and layer largest to smallest. Attach layers together with a brad, then fluff and mist with Tattered Angels. Allow to dry.

Enjoy! (I think I might make one of those cakes for my girls this weekend!)

Editing!

My Family and I returned back from holiday two weeks ago, and I've been slowly going through the 1585 photos that we took. Oh dear, how to make a scrapbook of all those photos....??? Well, I started with picking my favorites, and editing. I'll have a tutorial on how I did the choosing and organizing a manageable amount, but today I wanted to show you the importance of editing. It can take a nice picture and make it something special!

Here's the original:



Obviously I didn't take this! Thank you to the lovely lady who did, but couldn't she have waited for that guy to move? And the background's so busy. I'm only interested in my family.

So, using my favorite free editing software, GIMP, I cloned regular sand and got rid of the walking man coming out of my shoulder. Then I looked again, and decided to get rid of the other background noise. Here's the cloning result:



Looks a bit strange, but just wait... a crop to 8x10 proportions, and this one is ready to print!



This crop was done in GIMP, but you could easily do this after uploading to the photo developer. Did I mention GIMP is free? And it's quite similar to Photoshop. I <3 GIMP!

Don't forget that I have done GIMP tutorials on cloning and tidying up photos. See my post on Photo Restoration or watch the video I made for that post at my Youtube Channel.

Thanks for stopping by!

A Little Bit of Bling!

Today's LO is using old set of pictures, in which I wanted to convey a sense of excitment. I think I managed it with the bold and kind of crazy paper:



I know, lots of us are afraid to use those big crazy bright patterns in large quantities. I say, GO FOR IT! Up close of left side:



Right side carries over the colours, but more muted to add emphasis to the journalling:



Cheese-y pun!



The journalling, done with a white ball-point pen. I always prewrite on blank paper and edit. Then I test the pen I want to use on scrap. I had tried black and brown first, but the white looked so much better!



Supplies:
DCWV Summer Dream Stack
Fonts cut with SCAL2: Brush 455BT ("Fair") and Crazy Girlz Blond BTN Lt (everything else)
Frosted Lace Stickles
Rhinestones
Ink (all edges)

Snow Much Drama!

This is from DD#2's first encounter with snow:





Supplies:
Paper: Me & My Big Ideas "Sugarplum"
Cricut Cuts: Wall Decor and More, Gypsy Wanderings, Gypsy Font and Cuttin' Up
Cricut markers
White Snowflake brads