Scrap Whispers Challenge - Flower Power

This week's challenge #54 over at Scrap Whispers is Flower Power - the more flowers you use, the better. Now that was a fun one, but not as easy as I expected.

I'm the kind of person who you can take for a day out with a bunch of friends, and my photos will be of the views, flowers, trees, insects and other wild-life. I might get a few of my friends if I remember! That doesn't always make for good scrapping subject matter at the end of the day.

This is a typical example. We'd given my Mum a camera for her birthday. Her eye-sight is getting to the "there's nothing the matter with my eyes, it's just that my arms aren't long enough" stage, and she has arthritis in her fingers and can't always tell whether she's pressed the button or not. So mobile 'phones and remote controls are a bit of a nightmare. But this camera was a new touch-screen one, and she got on famously with it.

We took it with us when we went for a quick blow up at Polesden Lacey (and it WAS a blow - the wind was very parky indeed) and had a quick training session. Her delight at getting lovely shots so easily was infectious. When we got home, she went round the garden and took some more pictures, and after tea we plugged the SD card into their TV and had a slide-show in super-sized full colour. She kept saying "that's a good one - did I take that?" Hehee!

The flowers are mostly Flora Doodles by Petaloo with some Prima and EK Success as well as flower buttons from Spotlight. The lettering is Thickers, Rebecca Sower and American Crafts. The journalling stamp is from Kaiser-craft, cut with a QuicKutz flower die on my Cuttlebug.

I'm sure you'll find this easy peasy. Go on, have a flower-fest!

White on white

Now here's a good challenge: white-on-white from Charisma Cardz. For me the challenge wasn't so much making a beautiful white card, as photographing the wretched thing. Have you ever tried taking a monochrome photo? I don't think I had either until earlier today. My goodness!

Anyway, this is a card for a friend who is expecting a baby. I don't know whether it's a boy or a girl yet, so Colour Create's lovely idea of using soft pink, soft blue, white and silver was just right for this. Charisma Cardz's white-on-white also allowed colour on the image and sentiment - perfect. Add it to the new baby challenge at Simon Says and this sketch from Truly Scrumptious, (with stitching) and I'm chuckling with satisfaction.

And my card? Please forgive the photo. I ended up using DH's fancy new camera with the latest lens and a whole pile of white balance settings to play with. It's better than my trusty camera, and I still think it looks rubbish.

It's plain white card from the office stationer's. I had a field day with my Cuttlebug embossing folders: swiss dots, paisley and the pram-on-a-stamp that came with the machine. I inked the edges with silver Encore ink, coloured in the pram with my Copics and a silver pen. The balloon brads started life as gold and blue, and I heat embossed them silver, and tied them (that was fiddly) using Stampin' Up! silver elastic cord to the pram handle with a brad. The "stitching" was done using my paper piercer and a silver gel pen. The butterflies came from my stash.

Glowing

This card is for my friend in America who has recently been diagnosed with Stage 1 cancer. She is about to go through a dose of radiation treatment which involves her being in isolation for a few days, and then unable to have any physical contact with her little girl for a couple of weeks. She is being so positive about it, and cracking jokes about glowing in the dark, but it must be tremendously hard.

I drew the glow-worm myself, not being able to find any clip-art or stamp glow-worms out there. His tail is painted with fabric paint which glows in the dark ;-) and the verse is computer printed. The papers are all from Basic Grey's Lemonade collection, the ribbon was a gift from Georgina (thanks again!) and the butterfly was punched using my market-stall punch from Hong Kong, and eyeletted using my new Crop-a-dile. Everything is inked with Dew Drop Cosmic Copper ink, and the copper matting is from a box lid that I saved.

I'm entering this into these challenges: Basic Grey's animals (a glow-worm is an animal, right?) The Pink Elephant's polka dots, a bow and pink, Quixotic's butterflies, A Spoonful of Sugar's freestyle, and this Lili of the Valley sketch:

And after all that build-up, I suppose I ought to show you the card!

Flowers for the blind

This card is for my Mum to give to my great aunt, who will be 103 this year. I can't even imagine being 103! She has as much spirit now as she ever has, but her eye-sight is failing, so this card is bright with contrast and full of texture.

The challenge at Cute Card Thursday this week is, conveniently, flowers, and Sketch Saturday has provided this sketch, which I turned clockwise:

This is what I've done with it:

It's all card-stock. The blues are from Heidi Grace and the flower is DCWV. The brad and the ribbon are from Daiso, our Japanese $2 shop, and I punched the corners and the centre flower with EK Success punches. The border punch is from Martha Stewart.

Fruity fairies

I love this card! I think I've missed the Charisma Cardz fruity colours challenge by about 5 minutes, but it should still catch the Cute Card Thursday fairy challenge and the Friday Sketchers sketch:

This is for my bestest pal ;-) in England who has just completed on her new house after many years of soul-searching and house-searching. It's a message to the house and garden fairies to look after their new "tenant". Silly, I know, but if you can't be silly with your BFF, who can you be silly with? I can't wait to see the house now!

The papers, sentiment and stickers are all from Basic Grey's Lemonade collection except the orange mat which is from the DCWV citrus stack. The image is another from edupics coloured with Copics, and everything is inked with Green Tea by Artnic.

Gold mat with sentiment

Fab's week #3 challenge is to use a gold mat and a sentiment. No problem. I think I cleaned the LSS clearance section out of gold paper in their Christmas sales - and I'm SO glad I did. It has come in very useful, not only for cards.

Quixotic Challenges merely want us to ink up an old stamp. Well this sentiment stamp was amongst the first acrylic stamps I ever bought. 6 months later when I finally cracked the pack open, I discovered that they had congealed themselves to the backing plastic. Grr. I had to cut the plastic around the stamp and have been using them by sticking the backing to the acrylic block using repositionable adhesive. It's a pain, but it works. Mostly. So "old" is about right for these.

Our Creative Corner has a lovely simple sketch for us to use this week:

And as usual I've mucked about with it, but my version is recognisable.

The papers are from Heidi Grace and EK Success. The image is yet another from edupics coloured as usual with my Copics, which I also used to tint the felt snowflake from Paperchase. The brad is from American Crafts, and if I had kept the packaging from the melted stamps I'd be able to tell you where that came from too, but it went in the bin and the stamps almost followed. Luckily I'm a frugal soul and rescued them as best I could.

Scrap Whispers Challenge - The Write Stuff

Challenge #53 this week at Scrap Whispers is to focus on your journalling - tell a story. So many people struggle with journalling, and I must admit I cheated a little, in my opinion, by taking the "focus on your journalling" part rather than "tell a story".

I used DH's and my favourite-recipe-in-the-world, for molasses chocolate chip cookies. YUM! We had a good Saturday afternoon working together on this, with DH behind the camera as well as chopping nuts and running around after me - "can you grab the chocolate chips out of the fridge?" and "oops, pass me a cloth - quick!" not to mention being chief tester of the end product. And I may have double-checked the cookie quality a couple of times as well while I was working on the LO... well you have to be certain, don't you?

I used Basic Grey papers, scalloped circles cut with QuicKutz flower dies using my Cuttlebug, pink and white stickers from Heidi Swapp and pearls from Prima. There are also some stickers from a magazine freebie, and the title was cut using my Silhouette from scraps of Bazzill card-stock. The recipe comes from Eat Right 4 Your Type. It was a perfect excuse to make a LO and spend quality time with DH - hehee!

Now, over to you. Can you make your journalling the focus of a LO?