Let’s Go – Guest Design Layout

Hi hi!

Happy Inter-National Scrapbooking Day! Are you attempting bundles of challenges? Or picking out one or two that speak to you? I hope you have fun whatever challenges you are engaging in and perhaps you can also include this one in your plans!

A few weeks ago I was delighted to be chosen as favourite layout by the Scrap The Boys challenge team and to then be their guest designer for May. The theme for this challenge is Winter is Coming, which seems funny for us in the Northern Hemisphere, where Winter is just going! And then coming back, and then going again… About a week after I got the e-mail, my tendonitis kicked in big time and I had to stop crafting / moving my arm completely and I was really worried I wouldn’t get the layout started, let alone finished. In the end it took me about 5 days!

We don’t get much snow here on the south coast of the UK so I deliberately avoid snowy / wintery themed collections normally but of course, this year, we did have some and so I had to go shopping… I’ve not bought anything since November, but with the aid of some strong painkillers, I managed to end up with 3 packages coming through the post with only a small amount of it being the Carta Bella Winter Market that I needed… I’m back on my spending freeze now…

Freeze… see what I did there…

I saw a layout involving a circle of ink with a cut file over the top and I can’t for the life of me remember where I saw it. I’ve searched all my normal groups, my saved posts on IG, etc, nothing. Anyway, thank you to that lovely crafter, it inspired me to create a circular layout – perfect for a snowball fight! For my first layer I used clear embossing ink (sheesh, that needs replacing – it had started to suck itself back into the plastic!) with some very old snowflake stamps and white embossing powder and TRIED to get them into a rough circle.

The next layer was the Distress Oxide on a blending tool. Once I was happy with the blue, I used a clean cloth to rub over the snowflakes to polish up the white. Doing the inking after the stamping & embossing gives a crisper whiter finish to the snowflakes, especially as my inks and powders are a bit old now! I then used the same Oxide (Stormy Sky) as a watercolour to add some splatters and then some white acrylic paint splatters on top of that. I punched a load of snowflakes from white cardstock and arranged them around the circle with a tiny amount of glue before stitching in place with messy circles. I used my old Singer hand crank because I didn’t know how my electric machine would cope with the metallic thread, but of course I needed two hands to slowly rotate the layout. Mr Pretty ended up having to crank the handle for me!

I mounted my photos onto 2 different designs of patterned paper because I wanted to highlight the blue circle and green border to echo the blues and greens in the photos. I ignored Luigi’s red te-shirt of course… Honestly, teenage boys… a snowball fight in a te-shirt, I ask you!

Obviously I added some enamel dots from the same Carta Bella collection and then I took the opportunity to go wild with Bramble Fox winter perspextives – how gorgeous is that snow globe?!

The Scrap The Boys challenge is open until the end of the month so you have plenty of time to get your wintery layouts done featuring the chaps in your life. If you’ve been inspired this weekend, I’d love to see what you’ve created.

Have fun! x