October Afternoon

I dare you....

to create a page using only 4 products! Becky and Amy here today with a challenge for you. Here are the "rules":

We're giving you a few freebies: scissors, writing pen and adhesive. You pick 4 additional products to make a page. 

From Amy: Becky’s challenge was just that for me - a challenge!! I never knew I relied so heavily on so many different types of product/mediums when creating a page. I didn’t even sew on this page (gasp!) and for me that’s a big deal. I didn’t thread my buttons or anything. 

The four “things” I chose to work with were patterned paper, ribbon from the Miscellany packs, buttons and alpha stickers. I found myself really struggling to make my page flow in a way that I thought it needed to. Finally after lots of experimentation, I was able to get a design I am happy with. I’m especially happy with the how the colors work together. Both the ribbon and the buttons became integral elements in the design, both in creating attention and in toning down attention (as in the yellow ribbon over the plaid paper in the bottom left corner) which is something I’m really happy with. I didn’t need to sew on it after all. :)

Here's her awesome page!

I adore the color mix! 

So pretty! 

My 4 items were: 

sewing machine

pattern paper

paper distresser

alpha stickers

I hope this challenge pushes you to try something new! We'd love to see your projects on the OA Flickr gallery.  Thanks for participating!

Thursday Sketch: One Sketch, Seven Interpretations

good morning.  danni here with today's sketch challenge for you.  today we'll present one sketch and offer several different interpretations from that one sketch.

 

here is the sketch we'll be using today

 

 

 

joining me today is lexi.  lexi created this incredible tag that is such a fun interpretation of the sketch.

here's what Lexi had to say, "Christmas came and went without any snow for us so we still have the white stuff on our wish list! I am loving the simplicity of using standard office tags and dressing them up. I sprayed with background with Tinsel SprINKler (LOVE the subtle shimmer!) and punched 2 snowflakes. The negative space was backed with paper from Holiday Style, while the middle snowflake is part of an older paper doily with a Holiday Style sticker. Sequins complete the snowflakes with a stitched sentiment in the form of a Little Flyer across the bottom. The pom pom trim at the top is also from Holiday Style and worked perfect with the "snow" theme :)"

 

 

 

 

 

 

love the sprinklers on here and the use of an ordinary office supply, so amazing!  thank you lexi♥

 

i often get asked how i am able to create so many cards in a relatively short period of time, and i will share the answer with you today...giggle.  i create a sketch or use ONE sketch to create about 10 different cards before moving on to a new sketch. when choosing a sketch, or creating my sketch, i always choose a fairly simple "CAS" sketch so as to be able to have lots of room for interpretation.  sometimes i will use the same papers/elements, other times i will create each card with a completely different line, it really depends on the occasion.  let me explain with pictures and words so as to be a little clearer.

 

 for my first set of cards, i chose to use OA Holiday Style and create three different thank you cards (yes, i still need some and hope you might also)

 

thank you snowman card 

(click pics to enlarge)

 

 

on this card, i chose to use the three 'heart elements' as blocks for my  snowman.  i cut out the three blocks from the Holiday Style pp and then backed the blocks with white cardstock before stitching around and adding the details to the snowman.

 

 

 

 

 

december thank you card 

 

for this card i used the same sketch but interpreted the '3 heart elements' as layered die-cuts, snowflakes and chipboard.

 

 

 

holiday thank you card

i decided to interpret the three 'heart elements' as snowflake chipboard pieces, element chipboard and for the twist on this card, added three Little Flyers as the strips of pp.

 

 

 

after creating these three cards, i decided to play with some of the Farmhouse line on my desk to create three different cards

hello friend card

 

 

on this card i interpreted the three 'heart elements' as buttons and a center-focal.

 

 

i LOVE all the Farmhouse miscellany

 

 

 

happy birthday card

 

for the 3 'heart elements' i used two rounded blocks of pp and a layered center focal

 

 

 

 

love you card 

 

for the 3 'heart elements' on this card i chose to layer tickets/ hearts

 

 

 

 

i hope these card and tag ideas have inspired you to see this sketch and all it's possibilities on your next projects.  we would love to see your creations in our FLICKR GALLERY.

 

happy creating♥

danni

Monday Challenge-Document it now

Hi everyone, it's Becky posting today with a Christmas and holiday related challenge. I hope everyone enjoyed Christmas to the fullest this weekend! My challenge for you is to create a layout about your holiday this week, while the story is fresh in your mind. It's probably not realistic to document the whole experience, but I think just creating at least one page might help if you have holiday letdown or the blues. Plus, I know that as the busy days of this season go by, sometimes the little details will be forgotten if we don't get it done soon. 

Wilna created a pretty page for her December journal for this challenge-

If you haven't checked out her blog this month, you should go take a look at all of her beautiful December journal pages. So inspiring! Feel free to take today's challenge as a challenge to complete your December dailies and journals too!

Since our pages were due so quickly after Christmas, I didn't do as much journaling as I would encourage you to do now that you've experienced the big day. I am planning to make another page this week with more solid journaling with my memories. It was a sweet, sweet weekend! 

Lots of Holiday Style featured here. I mixed up the title work, using some Holiday Style, Rocket Age and a few of the early collections alpha stickers. I think it's always a good sign when you go back to products that were released a few years ago and still want to use them and they mix well with more recent products. 

I look forward to seeing some great holiday pages with your stories and photos! Please share them with us on the OA Flickr gallery.  

Thursday Sketch: Simple Holiday Design

Happy holidays, everyone! This week we're teaming up with Glue Arts to bring you some holiday fun along with a chance to win some October Afternoon and Glue Arts products. I (Vivian) am a huge fan of Glue Arts' Glue Glider Pro - I love how easy it is to use and to refill! My six-year-old daughter loves it as well, so I have to keep my eye on it or else it disappears! :)

Today's sketch offers a quick and easy design for holiday cards and layouts:

I shared the sketch with Roree, who came up with this adorable holiday card:

I love how she interpreted the three photo slots across the center as trees and the lines of journaling as stitching. In fact, let's get a closer look at that fabulous stitching detail!

I took the sketch and mirror-reversed it to create a layout showcasing a piece of holiday art my son created:

I stretched the artwork across two of the photo slots and placed my journaling in the third slot. The sticker at the bottom left takes the place of the lines of journaling in the sketch. I had a lot of fun using the pipe cleaners from the Holiday Style Miscellany to create my title letters:

If you create anything using today's sketch, please post it to our October Afternoon Flickr gallery - we'd love to see your creations!

Glue Arts is offering up a wonderful prize package if you go and visit their blog...

We'd like to give you a bit of Holiday Style too! Along with our GlueArts products! Just post a comment today...we really do enjoy hearing from you...and we'll enter you to win a collection kit from October Afternoon's NEW Holiday Style along with a GlueArts Embellishment Kit!!! ( Includes (1) Roll Ribbon Adhesive, (1) Roll Extreme Adhesive Squares, (10) Sheets Vellum Adhesive, (1) Sheet U CUT IT Foam, (16) Squares Raisen's, and (300) Micro Adhesive Squares.) We'll select one random winner and post their name on Christmas Eve!!

Glue Arts Day!

Hasn't the week been wonderful with all the wonderful projects form Glue Arts. We have a few more for you to see today. So we thank you for visiting from Glue Arts!

Danni has this super cute card:

And this from Lexi:

"Not gonna lie--this is just a corner of my desk where I create...and most often I create on the floor. It is always a mess, but the one thing I do always have handy is my Glue Arts Glue Glider Pro. Love that thing! It is so simple to change the adhesive, but that doesn't seem to happen much unless I am crafting up a storm, because there is lots of adhesive on each roll. I also like that it is the right amount of sticky for adhering vintage papers, like the old dictionary paper on the card I created here, without tearing the paper."

This one from Amy:

I used the 3D U Cut It Adhesive Foam blanks for my entire "ho, ho, ho!" sticker to give it dimension and it worked like a charm. I am also a HUGE fan of the Adhesive Squares. They are so thin and their tack is fantastic for a variety of applications including for different mediums such as ribbon and wood, as I've used in my card. I love them!

Glue Arts is offering up a wonderful prize package if you go and visit their blog.

We'd like to give you a bit of Holiday Style too! Along with our GlueArts products! Just post a comment today...we really do enjoy hearing from you...and we'll enter you to win a collection kit from October Afternoon's NEW Holiday Style along with a GlueArts Embellishment Kit!!! ( Includes (1) Roll Ribbon Adhesive, (1) Roll Extreme Adhesive Squares, (10) Sheets Vellum Adhesive, (1) Sheet U CUT IT Foam, (16) Squares Raisen's, and (300) Micro Adhesive Squares.) We'll select one random winner and post their name on Christmas Eve!!

 

Glue arts also gave us a product pack to give away to our customers too, and we had to add a little OA to it!
Look at all this great stuff!

I tried the new Ribbon Glue....it is truly amazing! I love how easy it was to apply and the stick is amazing. It is relly thin and comes on a roll, so you can cut it to any length. A tip I have is when you apply it to a bumpy ribbon (like the pom pom ribbon below, press it really good into the ribbon).

Don't forget to leave a comment here to win the wonderful prize from Glue Arts and October Afternoon.

 

Monday Challenge - A Mix of Photos.

Are you all counting down?  It's the last full week before Christmas.  I don't know about you, but I'll be wrapping gifts and paying close attention to my to-do list this week!

Over here at October Afternoon we've teamed up with Glue Arts this week.  So, be sure to take some time for yourself this busy holiday season... grab a cup of hot chocolate and enjoy what we have for you here on the blog.  :)

I'm (Marcy) up first and I have a challenge for you.  Earlier Amy issued a black and white photo challenge.  I wanted to see if we could take it a step farther and mix black and white photos with color photos.

I dug out Holiday Style and got to work.  

I decided to work with photos of my oldest boy building a snowman with the muddy, leafy snow from a first snowfall.

 

Clearly I'm still enjoying banners!  ;)  I'm madly in love with the chipboard buttons.  Also, when I want to use stickers on a banner I stick them to my jeans and pull them off a few times to get rid of the stickiness.

I tossed this challenge over to Jill and this is what she came up with.

I just adore all the handwriting samples!  Here's what Jill had to say.

"Looking at these photos of myself at sixteen prompted me to go back through the journals I kept as a teenager.  They are stuffed with memorabilia, including letters and old calendar pages. I incorporated a few of those items here on the page.  To enhance the page's theme, I worked in bits and pieces from the Farmhouse line Miscellany, journaling cards, and letter and label stickers. The page itself uses Farmhouse along with some Boarding Pass and Sidewalks -- they actually coordinate really well!  I also used some OA fabric behind the photos."

So there you have it.  I can't remember the last time I mixed color photos with black and whites! If you're up for the challenge please post your layout in our gallery and link to it in the comment section!  We'd love to see what you do.  :)

 

Glue Arts is offering up a wonderful prize package if you go and visit their blog...

We'd like to give you a bit of Holiday Style too! Along with our GlueArts products! Just post a comment today...we really do enjoy hearing from you...and we'll enter you to win a collection kit from October Afternoon's NEW Holiday Style along with a GlueArts Embellishment Kit!!! ( Includes (1) Roll Ribbon Adhesive, (1) Roll Extreme Adhesive Squares, (10) Sheets Vellum Adhesive, (1) Sheet U CUT IT Foam, (16) Squares Raisen's, and (300) Micro Adhesive Squares.) We'll select one random winner and post their name on Christmas Eve!!

December journal Sketch.

Hello! Wilna here! I absolutely adore the month of December! Coming from sunny South Africa to live in Canada, we now have a white Christmas every year which makes it more magical every year! I have been doing Ali Edwards' December Daily for the past 4 years and love it so. So for today's sketch, I am doing a layout that will work with your demeber daily (and any other aspect ratio). There is still one Afrikaans Magazine that I love and read every month on Zinio called Sarie. It's a gorgeously designed magazine and the sketch for today comes straight from it's pages:

 

 

So, translating this sketch to my December Daily album:

The lovely Becky played along and this is what she did. I mean... seriously? She is a.m.a.z.i.n.g. the end.

Merry Christmas!

love and a kiss

 

Tuesday Tutorial: Holiday Cards in a Snap

Happy Tuesday, everyone! Vivian here with this week’s tutorial. If you’re anything like me, you’ve got a million balls in the air right now. Any regular day finds me trying to squeeze it all in and when December hits the added holiday events and obligations make squeezing it all in next to impossible. I find I’m always behind in December!

I decided this year to come up with a couple of quick holiday card designs that I can turn to in a pinch (like when it’s fifteen minutes before we have to leave for a holiday event or 10:00 at night before the last day of school in December and I haven’t put anything together for my kids’ teachers or…you get the idea).

I created Card #1 for Hanukkah using the Farmhouse line, but this design could be easily replicated for Christmas or New Year’s or any other holiday by swapping out the papers and the greeting:

Happy Hanukkah Card How-to:

1. Cut a 3.75” X 5” piece of cream cardstock.
2. Print greeting (or write greeting) on a Little Flyer or scrap of patterned paper. (If I had made this as a Christmas card I could have just grabbed a pre-printed greeting from one of the following Holiday Style products: Word Stickers, Little Flyers, or the Flower Sack.)
3. Adhere greeting to left edge of cream cardstock about 1/2" up from the bottom.
4. Machine stitch around the cream rectangle twice – once with a (relatively) straight line and once with a wavy line. I can stitch a card like this in a minute or two because I don’t care how messy it is. This detail can also be added with a pen if you don’t sew or if you want to make this step even quicker.
5. Cut a 5.5” X 8.5” piece of black cardstock and fold it in half to form the card base.
6. Adhere stitched cream cardstock rectangle to card base.
7. Punch three circles from patterned paper.
8. (Optional): Adhere punched circles to metal-rimmed tags. (I happened to have some tags lying around and thought this added a bit of fun holiday sparkle to the card.)
9. Adhere circles to card.

Card #2 was created for Christmas using Holiday Style, but this design can also be easily adapted by forming a different shape with buttons (a heart, a star, etc.):

Noel Card How–to:

1. Cut a 3.75” X 5” piece of black cardstock.
2. Adhere 10 small buttons to the black cardstock to form a tree.
3. Adhere a greeting (here I used a Flower Sack element but you could also use a sticker or a greeting printed on patterned paper or cardstock) below the button tree.
4. Tie baker’s twine from the Wrap Pack around the bottom of the card and trim ends.
5. Cut a 5.5 X 8.5” piece of cardstock and fold in half to form a card base.
6. Cut a 4.25” X 5.5” piece of patterned paper.
7. Adhere patterned paper to card base.
8. Using dimensional adhesive (pop dots, foam squares, etc.), adhere black cardstock to center of patterned paper on card.

Hope these card designs prove helpful to you, whether you're crunched for time or not! If you create cards based on these designs, please post them to our October Afternoon Flickr pool - we'd love to see your work!

Monday challenge: Add a Bag!

Is it Monday again already?! Welcome to another Monday Challenge--Holiday version ;) Lexi here with you today and the idea for this week came to mind as I was looking at all the pretty packaging this time of year. While noticing some fun designs on bags from stores (think Trader Joe's, Starbucks, etc.) I thought...why not a bag challenge? That's right--let's add some kind of bag to our projects!
Dani joined me for the challenge and here are her creations, which are nothing short of beautiful.

She created these sweet tags using Very Merry stamps, glassine bags and Holiday Style. The glassine bags give off the perfect frosty look for this time of year. Who wouldn't love to receive this package Christmas morning? 

 I played around with a few bag ideas myself...

Although this isn't terribly holiday-ish, I loved how that striped brown paper bag looked with bits from Farmhouse, Sasparilla & Sidewalks collections. It almost looks like the leaves are falling out of it. I used my vintgae typewriter to add the journaling before gluing it down. 

The Farmhouse tin pin helped highlight his age on the number strip, while the tickets from the Sidewalks miscellany make a perfect border. 

This is a page from a current December mini I am making, in which the background is a glassine bag. I just cut it down in size to fit the book. Because the picture was about the night we decorated our tree I filled it with sequins and punched snowflakes before sewing it shut. The chipboard tree is from the Holiday Style miscellany pack and was sprayed with Boarding Pass sprinkler. 

Can you see the bag part of the project here? 

Yep, it's from a Starbucks bag last year that I saved. The white text on the brown bag was perfect for a card. I simply trimmed it down to size, sprayed on some Paper Doily sprinkler and sewed it down before layering on Holiday Style goodies. 

So, how about you . Have you seen any cool bags this year? Why not save one and give this challenge a try? Load them up in the October Afternoon Flickr gallery so we can admire them! Enjoy your holiday season and have a merry day!

-Lexi

Thursday Sketch: Take Five!

Hello, and thank you for joining us for the Scrap-Mart Holiday Blog Hop. Scrap-Mart has teamed up with these fabulous manufacturers to bring you a week-long blog hop dedicated to Christmas-themed projects!

Boss Kut
October Afternoon<----Hey that's us!
The Rubber Cafe<----head here next!
Canvas Corp
Heartfelt Creations (Dec. 7th)
Want2Scrap
LaLa Land Crafts
Sizzix
JustRite Stampers

Each of the generous manufacturers will have prizes for you along the way, so be sure visit and complete the hop each day from December 5th through December 10th to be eligible to win. If you are just joining in, be sure to head over to the Scrap-Mart blog to start the hop from the beginning.  

Don't start hopping just yet, though!  We have this week's sketch to share with you:  

The whole concept behind the sketch is to take five items -- five photos, five journaling cards, five blocks filled with accents, or a mix of all of these -- and arrange them across a page. Then gather together some fun little bits and pieces and run them across the top and bottom of the page.  That is exactly what Stacey and I (Jill) did with our own layouts, using the new (and much-loved) Holiday Style collection.  

Here's my take on the sketch: 

I decided to "take five" with four patterned blocks and an adorable holiday photo of my husband and his sister as children (I can't help but think of A Christmas Story when I see this photo -- "you'll shoot your eye out!" ).   To create the "25" on two of the patterned pieces, I traced over two number stencils and cut out negative spaces using an X-acto knife.  I then adhered stickers, cut-up journaling cards, items from the Holiday Style Miscellany, Wrap Pack trim, and patterned bits under the letters, added a snowflake rub-on, and then placed the "2" and the "5" -- backed with adhesive dots -- over everything. 

The "take five" concept is catchy, sure, but sketches are meant to be adapted, and that is just what Stacey did.  Her interpretation of the sketch includes four rather than five items running across the page.  Isn't it hilarious that she, too, focused on a brother-and-sister holiday photo? What a merry coincidence!  

I love how her journaling runs fluidly down the page, and how she incorporated a bit of holly into the title block.   It's such a sweet and festive layout!  

We'd love to see how this sketch has inspired you.  Make it your own!  Be sure to share your version in the October Afternoon Flickr gallery.  

Okay, now you can start hopping.  Have fun! 

-- Jill