Halloween Craft-a-thon

I am glad my day off moved to today as I am exhausted. We had a great time on Saturday and most of the ladies joined in and dressed up. Witches seemed to be the order of the day as we had lots of those. Probably because the hit musical 'Wicked' has only recently finished performing here. We also had an evil nurse, a dead school girl, a new mum complete with devil baby, and a crazy wig.

My wings were too uncomfortable so I took them off and ended up looking a little gothic :-)  I didn't have any purple eye shadow so I used some purple Smooch instead.  It worked fine but took quite a while to dry.  Thankfully it washed off easily!  I have attached a few photos below for you.  Lunch was a huge hit with the ladies as always, and so were the homemade cookies.

Now to clear my desk and party with my pretty paper!

Chipper

ME!

Our wall at the end of the evening.  I have more photos to add.

Do you take photos with an iPhone or iPad?

Well if you do you might like to take a look at this blog HERE.  I found this blog by chance a while ago and I have been following it.  The part I like most is the FREE photo apps.  In the past few weeks I have downloaded five photo apps for free that normally cost a nominal fee.  The current free app for this weekend is called 'IncrediBooth' and takes photos like an old photo booth.  I wouldn't buy most of these apps, but they are GREAT for free.

So if you like taking fun photos with an Apple device you might want to go have a look.  In case you were wondering, I don't know the people running the site, and I am not getting any benefits by telling you this.  Only sharing it so you can have a bit of fun like me.

Chipper

Sneak peak ...

I thought I would share with you all a few sneak peaks of our classroom decorated for our Halloween party. A customer who is coming to the craft-a-thon kindly lent us her decorations. My only contributions were the streamers, balloons and everything on the table.  Two of our DT along with a customer came along and helped decorate.  It looks great!

Enter if you dare!

Our DT wall.  The decorations were all cut on the Eclips.

The hallway to the toilets.  The classroom is the door on the right.

The entry.  The food table will be on the wall to the left.  The classroom is through the double doors.

The left side of the classroom

The table packs.  I printed off everyones names.

We dressed up our dummy in The Thinkers old ghost costume.  The Princess made the sign.

The right side of the classroom

They even decorated the ladies!

I took the photos with my new iPhone 4s!  Pretty good for the default camera.  We have a holiday here tomorrow so we are all looking forward to the day off and baking cookies!  Then the 12hr Craft-a-thon on Saturday.  

Enjoy your weekend,

Chipper

Pretty Paper Party

I was so inspired by the bonus video that Shimelle gave all the 'Pretty Paper Party' participants.  I LOVED the principle of collecting up a bunch of papers and running from there.  However I ran into a snag when I couldn't find any tone on tone papers and was finding that I was spending AGES trying just to find paper!  My old early paper collection was still stored by colour and everything that had been released since Basic Grey 'Black Tie' was stored by collection.  Once I ran out of my thin plastic paper containers they were stored in their collection packs in a few vertical paper holders.  Trying to match papers across collections was a nightmare as it took me forever to look for them.  So the solution ... spend my day off re-organising my papers!!!!!

I thought to myself that it would probably take me 2-3 hours to organise my papers and then I could start the prompt.  HAH!  I should have known better ... try 10 hours!!!!!!!  But is was worth it.  I took EVERY paper out of packs, pads, containers and places that I never knew I had papers in and sorted them by colour.  Those that were heavily themed and multi coloured also had their own pile.  I found papers I had forgotten but thankfully still loved, papers that I hated, old nostalgic papers that were flood damaged that I had saved to remind me not to hoard paper again, AND paper I didn't even know I had!!!  One collection pack really brought that home to me.  It was a pack which had a collaged paper on the front with a forrest and a deer.  It was hugely popular in its time and for some reason I bought it.  I have never even used ONE paper from it as every time I picked it up I was put off by the cover.  But open it and I found some of the most beautiful paper I have ever seen!  I was missing out on pretty paper!!!!

My patterned paper!

This is my patterned paper collection.  In it you will find papers from very old to very new, popular brands to non branded.  The containers under the table stored the 'organised' papers and now hold organised embellishments.  I then put them all into Artbin Super Satchels (like the purple one in the picture) in colour themes.  While sorting I discovered something new.  I actually have lots of tone-on-tone papers, they were all still in collection packs and books of papers.  I also learned that I really, really like the colour blue-green and I may just have to take the blue pile and the green pile and spilt it three ways.  At the moment the bluer ones are with the blues and the greener ones are with the greens.  And here they are once I put them all away in their new homes ...

The big one at the bottom holds all of my multi coloured papers.  There are no plain or themed papers in this stack.  :-)  But my real challenge is in the pink container at the top.  That one hold my MME Lost and Found papers.  I just couldn't bring myself to sort them, nor it seems can I find a way to use them that doesn't involve mini books!!!  I am looking forward to the day this class covers those difficult papers.  They are so beautiful that I could just put one photo on each page and put it in an album, or of course photo-less just so they can be admired :-)

So now that my patterned paper was sorted I decided to put my cardstock into the vertical paper holders (I think I need three more!).  Ohhhhhhhhh ... so organised now!

And then I had to sort all of the other stuff that came out of those Artbins and all of the die-cuts, rubons, alphas and accessories that had come out of each collection pack!  Those are in the old thin paper containers.  WOW, such a lot of organising!!!!  But now I feel that I may just be able to find things and USE them!  I will be quite busy between now and the craft-a-thon so it may just have to wait until Tuesday, but I am looking forward to trying out my new system.  It may seem crazy, but I feel inspired now that I am organised.  I will let you know how I get along with it.

On another note, I died my hair tonight for our craft-a-thon.  It is now a black/purple.  I actually love it, even if it is only an 8 wash rinse.  But now I have to alter my costume.  I was going to be just purple but I couldn't find any in a rinse.  My costume was purple, silver and white.  Now it needs to be purple, silver and black.  I should have time change all of the white to black as I am only recycling an old costume.  I will be a fairy with lots of home made bits and a pair of my daughters wings.  I will share pictures after the event.

Chipper

Halloween Craft-a-thon

At the shop we are having a 12hr Halloweek Craft-a-thon!  I really want everyone to have lots of fun and it isn't really just about dressing up as only about half of the 24 people attending will dress up.  We are planning on using the dummy from my previous post as a scarecrow that will hold this sign that I made today at the entry.  I have made a few more things for the attendees that I thought I would share.

When each person arrives they will find a welcome pack at their place at the table.  It includes info for the day and some competitions.  There will also be a small pumpkin 'pick-me-up-pack' for those sugar lows during the day.  They are just pumpkin boxes with a few sweets in them.

We have both cardmakers and scrapbookers (and a few that do both!) coming to our craft-a-thon.  In their welcome pack they will find a BINGO card for each craft.  The idea is that they can cross off each box as they do them, but they can only use ONE box per project.  The first person to complete any 5 in a row wins! So there will be a winner for each craft.  Here are the BINGO cards that I made (I hope you can see them as they did not like being turned into a photo).

We have all sorts of other mini competitions planned and a few of us are decorating the room on Wednesday.  It is going to look so good!  One of the other games is a guessing game.  I got the idea of the net somewhere but it is great to help people new to crafting learn the names of some of the tools of the trade.  We are putting 12 random craft items into paper bags.  Each bag is then labeled 1 thru 12.  Everyone can feel the bags and try to work out what is in each without peeking.  I wonder if anyone will work out all 12?  I still haven't even decided what 12 items to use!

So lots to get done around here by Saturday morning.  The LOML even cooks them all a hot lunch!  We cheat for dinner though and get in pizza.  And I have promised them all that I will bake them Black Eyed Susans for morning tea.  There are some wonderful ladies coming and I am sure we will all have a great time.

Chipper

A crafty project ...

We have all been really busy here with work as it is my long week. But tonight The Princess and I wanted to make a soft bodied fabric dummy to turn into a scarecrow. Thankfully my mom gave us a huge box of fabric a week ago that she was going to throw away. We found a large piece of calico in it perfect for our dummy.

First I laid down on the fabric and The Princess drew around me leaving a seam allowance. We then added quite a bit to the head as we wanted a big head. After I sewed the two pieces together we stuffed the body and sewed 'joints' as we went. So here is our 'dummy' ...

And here she is with clothes on. Not a bad few hours work and heaps of fun.  Now to decide what she will wear for Halloween.

We might even add more stuffing for Christmas and make her into Santa!

Chipper

P.S.  I haven't forgotten about my Pretty Paper Party :-)  I have been working on it and will share after my day off.  Loving it!!!

Pretty Paper Party - Day 3

I had great plans after my day 1 post.  I even made another layout based on one of the other sketches while I was waiting for my day 2 prompt to hit my inbox.  But then disaster struck ... in the form of food poisoning.  YUK!  Needless to say I didn't do anything yesterday :-)

But I am back at it today and I have just finished a layout for the day 2 prompt.  I will photograph it later when there is light.  So now onto day 3 and I have discovered a HUGE gap in my patterned paper collection.  Did you know that I have hardly any tone on tone or small repeat patterns in my stash???????  It seems that I love patterns in all their glory along with plain cardstock.  The two extremes.  Day three is going to take me a while just to get organised enough to have the sheets of patterned papers required!!!!!

I am looking forward to seeing what I find, but this prompt will probably have to wait until my day off next week.  Maybe I should consider rearranging my stash.  I tend to keep collections together until there is hardly any left and then they go in the scrap-box according to their dominant colour.  Maybe I should just file all the papers I buy according to colour too.  Then it would be nice and easy to pull out 8 sheets of co-ordinating colour!!!  Do you have any suggestions?  Have you found a productive way of storing your full sheets?  Strangely enough I stored them by colour when I first started 'collecting' papers.  After I became familiar with companies and bought whole collections, I changed how I stored them.

Stay tuned until next week for the results of this prompt :-)  I wonder if the missing type of patterned paper is part of the reason I often fiddle with a single page for hours trying to 'fix' my layout.  That could be what my eye is searching for .... hmmmmm .... will have to think on that!

Chipper

Pretty Paper Party - Day 1

Ohhhhhhhhhh ... Day one of the party!!!!!  Did you join in?  If not, why not do it now ... click on the link on the right and jump in at any time.  The best part is that this party can last as long as it takes to finish.  Great for busy people like me!  The fist step was to take a photo of some of your paper, or a sheet of your favourite paper.  After much thought I decided to show you a photo of the patterned paper that lives on my desk to encourage me to use it.  Bear in mind this is only a small portion of my paper stash (maybe I shouldn't have said that ...).  The plan is to rotate papers in and out of the paper holders from my main stash so that I have less to chose from and actually use it!

I loved todays prompt about using up your scraps, however I decided to do a layout using the same ideas but finally using papers from one of those cheap stacks we all bought long ago!  The colours are very nice on the papers but the style of them is just not me anymore.  However by cutting them up I really like them on the page.

VERY old Autumn Leaves Paperbilities stack

I love the stitching and the paper strips, however I do not like the beads.  The idea worked in my head but not on the page, but once I had committed myself I had to keep going.  I even found some old journalling blocks in the same colours (which were probably bought at the same time!) and so I used them too.

I will definitely be using this idea again.  I had so much fun stitching the strips on.  A very relaxing way to spend my day off.  I hope that I can sort of keep up for the rest of the week.  Waiting for my next prompt to come through.  They usually land in my inbox around now.

Chipper

Shimelle's Starting Point

Embrace your 'wonkicity'!!!!  I did :-)  Shimelle's starting point this week had a wonky strip of paper.  I kinda altered the placement of the strips of paper to suit my planned page.  Here is the starting point.

And here is mine with a photo of The LOML at the 50's Prime Time Cafe.

My Little Shoe Box 'Sew Cute' & 'Garden Party'

If you knew him you would see the humor in the page :-)  Note the hour hand pointing to the glass of wine.  As this is a series of photos all taken at the same lunch I have decided that they will all be on My Little Shoe Box papers as this is the third layout and it has just worked out that way LOL.  I have also fake stitched as the other pages also have stitching.  The blue stitching around the edge was done with a Sakura Souffle pen.  They look terrible when you first draw with them but once they are dry they are amazing!

When we arrived at the restaurant we all had cocktails with flashing ice blocks in them.  The kids thought they were great!  Along with the fact they were choosing a drink off the 'cocktail' menu.

Chipper

A New Class

Today is the start of a NEW class by Shimelle!  I am eagerly awaiting todays prompt which normally gets emailed in the afternoon my time.  A whole month of cutting up pretty paper prompts!!!!!

If it sounds good to you, it is never too late to sign up.  Head on over and join in.

Chipper

Shimelle's Starting Point

I wasn't a huge fan of Shimelle's last starting point (although I LOVE the papers she chose).  I think that is because I just recently scrapped a double page that was very much like this and I don't like it at all.  In fact I haven't even finished it yet as I am uninspired by it.  So when I saw the following starting point I wasn't very thrilled.

I have a friend who hasn't scrapped much in the past year or so and she is trying to get motivated to get back into it.  So a few weeks ago I asked her if she would do a sketch challenge just between the two of us.  I printed off the weekly sketch by Shimelle for her (she doesn't have internet access) and we gave each other a week to do it.  Sunday came around and our pages couldn't have looked different!!  (mine was the Halloween one I just posted)  It was great and she was so happy.  I told her that this time we would start with a starting point instead and this was the one we were going to use.  So I had to do something :-)

My Little Shoe Box 'Garden Party' & 'Sew Cute'

I got up early this morning and the house was nice and quiet so I finally got a start on it.  I do like how it turned out, but it drove me crazy in the process LOL.  I only finished it this evening when I got home from work.

I love to ink and heat emboss my chipboard and this bag of butterflies are some of my favourite.  I have no idea what happened to this one, but one of the layers wasn't happy and it looks like a furry butterfly.  My daughter says it is her favourite!

For the glitter on the second butterfly I first embossed it with clear and then sprinkled on some holographic silver embossing powder and heated it again.

I still have my few old foam stamps sitting on my desk and so I put them to use again.  I don't think they know what hit them!  They stamped the brackets around the photos.

This page doesn't really need a big title or lots of journaling as it is in the middle of a series of photos all taken at the same place, the 50's Prime Time Cafe.   So I just added bits and pieces of embellishment until I was done.  I had a picture in my mind of how it should look and I couldn't find anything in my stash that fit that image.  Oh well, I have to keep using up what I have if i want to buy more :-)

Neither I nor my friend had our layouts finished today, so we are going to compare them next week.  It was her turn to come up with a challenge for us and she went to the local paint store and brought us back each a set of the mixed colour paint swatches.  You know the ones I mean, with the colour combos already put together for using around our home.  That way we can randomly pick one and go with it.  Boy is that going to be a challenge, some of the combinations are way out there!!!  It is fun to craft with someone though.

Enjoy your week,
Chipper

Some Christmas Cards

I haven't done a great deal over the past few days as I have been working alot and I have had a terrible headache almost non stop.  I think it is the suddenly warmer weather.  Hopefully my increased water intake will get rid of it soon.  I get so busy at work that I forget to drink water!

Earlier this week I started playing with some of my new Papermania Christmas goodies.  I was really looking forward to trying some of the new big stamps.  I sulked when I couldn't find a big enough acrylic block until I remembered what a friend told me to use ... my Cuttlebug 'C' plate!  That fixed that problem and I was off.  I am by no means amazing at colouring-in, but I so enjoy it.  Here are the first few I made ...

The sun was very bright so the colour is a little off and you can't see any of the sparkle.  My clear Sakura Stardust pen was put to work on all of these!  I love that pen and if you like instant sparkle, go grab yourself one.  You won't regret it!

I coloured mostly with my Zig Brushables.  I like them because they are kinda foolproof :-)  No need to worry about what blends with what!

I also tried colouring the baubles with some Sakua Glaze pens.  I hardly ever use them and thought I really should get them out.  I think I would prefer using them if I had heat embossed the image.  They look a little messy for me.  However I liked the stamps and the kids have also enjoyed colouring some in too.

So that is 4 cards down ... I suppose I should figure out how many I am sending out this year!

Chipper

Open wide ... it's an aeroplane

When dining at the 50's Prime Time cafe in Disney's Studios it is never wise to leave an unfinished portion of dinner on your plate.  The waiter is likely to pick up your fork and make it into a aeroplane and fly it towards the hopefully open 'hanger'!!!!  Funny if you are a kid, embarrassing if you are an adult. (I finished everything on my plate!)  I actually think The Extrovert deliberately left some food on his plate so he could be in on all the action.

My Little Shoe Box 'Garden Party' & 'Home Tweet Home'

I used some papers from My Little Shoebox (along with a scrap of American Crafts clouds) and quickly assembled the base of this layout.  If it wasn't for all the hand stitching this would have been another quick one!  I cut the plane on my Cricut and stitched a loopy flight path.  I then stitched the "open wide" in the same thread.  After all the time (and patience) it took to stitch those two bits, I cheated and drew stitching lines everywhere else.  I added a few extra clouds for a bit more detail and this one was done.  I have been itching to use some of these papers and they weren't working with any photo I had to hand but they were a perfect fit for this one :-)

Chipper

P.S. I always spell 'airplane' like this and for some reason when it came to doing the title I spelt it 'aeroplane'!  As I was doing this page I had the tune from an old Aussie TV commercial about 'Aeroplane Jelly' floating around in my head and without realising it I spelt it the way they do.  And I don't even call jell-o 'jelly'!!!!!!  Oh the woes of a mixed up childhood LOL  Here is the advert that was replayed on TV when I was a kid.  Enjoy, and don't get the song stuck in your head :-)