Watercolor fun

 Hi all, I've returned today with some more bright and bold projects featuring my teenagers - who simply refuse to wear colours anymore! lol 

They often just wear black these days, making my scrapbooking quite the challenge. My theory now is not to worry if they won't bring the colour to our photos, that's my job now - some cute papers, a bit of creativity and in this case some bright watercolour paints and we are back to living life in colour! 

For this page, I started by adding in a bit of watery blue and green to the background. This photo was taken at the beach, and I wanted to reflect this feeling. 

Once the watercolour paint had dried I used this groovy heart stencil to simply draw in a background pattern. I used the A6 stencil from the multi-pack for these smaller-sized hearts.

I also used watercolours to paint onto these beautiful floral and stem chipboards to create my little flower patch ... this is a super easy and effective way to colour chipboards... and to add a bit of variety to the finished flowers I also did a few details with a white gel pen before hitting them with the colour. 

The good thing about watercolour is that once it has dried you can go back over the chipboard as many times as you like, making the colour richer and richer if you are keen.

The rest of the layout is just a big blur of fun pen work and embellishments - I was really wanting the page to reflect the whimsical fun of the photo.

My second Project is a gift tag that I just couldn't resist whipping up from the leftover papers and chipboard I used for my layout. 

This time I made my flower chipboards stretch even further by cutting one in half and offsetting them on the edge of the tag ... I also went over them with more paint so that they were a very bright pink.

 

This time I used the heart stencil at the end and just kind of let it be a guide as I added hearts to the finished tag rather than my usual trick of using it as a background tool. 

I also added a special message to the back of this gift tag ... tags are a great alternative to cards 💖

And that's it for me today, I hope you are all enjoying your creative journey and have found some inspiration in today's blog. 

Cheers, Kel xo

Background Stencil Heros

Greeting from beyond the school holidays ...

It was a close call, but I'm happy to report I survived the summer 20/21 school holidays ... just! 🤣

I had one child right in the middle of it all break her leg so we came home early and sat at home for the next 4 weeks trying to kill each other - a very common summer pastime for many Australians!

Fortunately I had lots of photos of fun summers gone by to keep me going on the scrapping front and I'm here today to share a few...

The hero's of all my projects in this post really tare the background stencils I used ...

Firstly this flying birds Stencil - one that I come back to over and over - it's simply the most used and versatile stencil in my whole collection! 

Next I teamed that up with this lattice stencil that I felt really complimented the 

Diamond mesh chipboard I also used on the layout.

Diamond Mesh 02

And of course I couldn't resist some fun word embellishments to dress up the page a bit...

Scrap Words 01 

and Scrap Words 52 

For this next layout - I really got messy!

I'm not usually a messy scrapper, but this was fun lol. I used the circles stencil and a bright marker to draw out the bright deep pink in the photo onto the white background of the page and then softened it all with a heavy handed inking approach. 

Circles Stencil 

This stencil is a little underwhelming to look at on its own ... 

but once you see the beautiful patterns it leaves behind you will be hooked! 

I can't actually resist and ornate topper or two here and there on my layouts ...

another staple item that easily adds dimension and interest to any page .

Ornate toppers 01

And of course those groovy scrap words .... obviously I cannot live with out them!! 😂

Scrap Words 31

Scrap Words 52

And the final project I'm sharing today is an up-cycled travel mug. 

When my daughter broke her leg she became a permanent resident of the lounge room...

(she has a loft be in her room that she could no longer access 😬 )

Obviously the 'NO food or drinks in the lounge room' rule went straight out the window and I dug out an old travel mug for her have her drinks in ... in the hope of avoid spills on the lounge. She (specifically as an 11 year old) was HORRIFIED at the 'Hello Kitty' cup I supplied her with and begged for a different one. No way was I wasting money on a new one so you could imagine my delight when I found the top simply screwed off! 

The gorgeous circles stencil was still sitting on my desk from the last layout I did so I grabbed it and got to work... here is how I took the cup on the left and turned it int the cup on the right...

.   

After taking out the old inside, I used it as a template to cut some paper for the new inside.

grabbing this fabulous Circles stencil one more time I got to work...

I used white Gesso and a scrapper tool over the stencil. 

The final result after it dried was AWESOME.

I then stuck a few butterflies and a die cut word on there and it was done in under 15 mins.

.  

My daughter LOVED it and has all her drinks in it now! 💕

I'll be up-cycling all my travel mugs and keep cups with panel compartments from now on. 

And thats it from me ... for now... I hope you all have a fabulous start to 2021 xo

Cheers from Kel

Beach Babes

This summer will be filled with trips to the beach for our family ... its one of our favourite ways to spend a day - so as you might imagine I end up with millions of beach themed photos!

In order to try and keep my albums fresh I'm always trying to come up with ideas for beachy layouts that don't necessarily have the blue/sea shell/lighthouse etc themes central to them. Here are a couple i came up with recently...

Using this stencil allowed me to pull in the exact colours I was after on this layout.

 

... you can't go wrong with anything leafy and tropical on beach pages.

And of course some times you end up with beach photos that have none of the common costal colours in them just the sandy tones ... this is my attempt to work with that kind of image...

Sun sets and dark silhouettes work perfectly together!

Raw chipboard is the perfect base colour to blend with sandy scapes.

 

I love this template for sandy pages - because it fully reminds me of the little balls of sand that crabs roll onto the beach each day ( as a kid I would love to collect them, doing my best to pick them all up without breaking them lol)💛

Here I've used both black ink and a white pen to make a messy ball pattern on the page.

I hope there is some inspiration in that lot for your own beach pages xo 

Cheers, Kel xo