October Afternoon

Sketchy Thursday

good morning everyone.  danni here with this week's sketch.  today i decided to switch it up a little and create a lo sketch but it could easily translate into a card sketch or mini album sketch. 

 

 

with all the cute banners in the Farmhouse and Sidewalks lines, fun chipboard stickers, Miscellany packs and Little Flyers, i wanted to create a sketch that would include a banner as one of the focals.

 

 

here's the sketch   

 

 

 

 

 

 joining me today is marcy who created this amazing lo.  i love her splatters, her notebook, her titlework, her banner, it's all...well, "rad"

 

rad by marcy

 

 

here's what marcy had to say about the sketch creating process

 

"I made a few tweaks to the sketch. I kept the little notebook element in the middle, moved the title down and extended the banner. In my little notebook I included additional photo and some journaling as well as layered some labels from the Farmhouse collection. To make my banner I trimmed triangles from the patterned papers and also trimmed some of the flags in half." 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and here is my interpretation

 

tea by danni

 

 

i created my banner, cutting one of the lace banners from the Farmhouse  pp here:Clothesline, die-cut a scalloped circle which i folded in half and stitched onto the banner, cut an additional block banner from the same sheet of pp, layered on top of the lace banner, layered with some buttons and tin pins and even a paper strip from one of the pp titles.

 

 

 

 i decided to move my title down so as to allow the butterfly to remain the focal on the left side.

 

 

 
 

    the layered notebook element inspired me to layer my picture several times and create a layered large butterfly focal. to create the butterfly, i printed the large butterfly image on the backside of my pp, decreased it in size, printed it on the backside of additional pp. i then layered the butterflies and stitched them together.

 

 

 love all the chipboard pieces in the Miscellany packs, they are so much fun to create with and layer

 

 

 

we hope you enjoyed today's sketch. if you can play along with us this week, please share how this sketch inspired you in our OA Flickr group.

happy creating♥

danni

What do you do for your 9-5 job?

WE CREATE!!!!

and have this PEEK just for you of the first of three new lines being released at CHA !!!

This one is named, 9 to 5, of course! Stop back later in the week, as well as next week for the other two releases.

Oh my gosh! So cute! Let us know what you think. We love feedback!

Tuesday Tutorial: Hanging Hearts

Good morning! It's Lexi on the blog today bringing you a simple tutorial on this happy Tuesday. The inspiration behind this post came from, where else, Pinterest. *sigh* I really could waste hours, if I had hours to waste!, on that site. Surely I am not the only one, right? Lately I have been pinning Valentine's Day inspiration--already? It's almost hard to believe that it is next month. 

How fun are these crayon hearts, courtesy of Martha Stewart? (I think I need to make them with my kiddos.) I took the general idea of the hanging hearts and translated to a layout using the Farmhouse line. 

First, I decided what pic to use and the title. I knew I wanted the hearts to fall from the top of the page so I scrapped my title and photo closer to the bottom. 

I used my Cameo to cut out all the hearts, but you can just as easily use a heart punch. The only heart punch I had was tiny and I wanted some bigger hearts with varied shapes, so using a die cut machine came in handy.

Looks valentines-y already :)

Start to arrange your hearts to get an idea of their placement. I knew I wanted them falling in a straight line leading to the photo and title. 

To get dimension, stack your hearts on top of one another and sew down the middle. I like to add several layers, with different patterns and heart sizes. 

I loved the frosty look the wax paper gave the crayon hearts in the original inspiration image, so I punched smaller vellum hearts to add to the layout. Some are sewn with the bigger hearts. All the paper used is from Farmhouse, except for the red/white dot, which is from Holiday Style. The smaller hearts all come from the Farmhouse Flowersack and worked perfect for this idea.

another view-

and all together now-

I loved this little tag and used some of the twine in the Farmhouse wrap pack to tie it around the photo. You can see a few of those vellum hearts peeking out. 

While I had these scraps and this idea of hearts on my mind, I decided to whip up a card too. Do you ever do that? Make a card with your scraps after creating a layout? The negative space from the cut out hearts were perfect as a background for a Valentine card.

All of this is from the Farmhouse line as well. I added the label sticker on top of a piece of lace from the Wrap Pack and a scrap of linen material. You can see the negative space from the hearts that were cut out...and a few vellum hearts sewn down. A mini, more simple version of the layout.

Are you already thinking Valentine's Day? Maybe you are now! If you do try your hand at a hanging hearts layout or any kind of Valentine's project using October Afternoon we would love to see! Link us up here or add it to our inspiration-filled Flickr gallery :)

Thanks for joining me and have a great Tuesday!

 

Monday Challenge: Using Your Not-Quite-What-You-Expected Photos

Happy Monday! Stacey here, bringing you a new challenge for this week.Use a photo (or a pile of them!) that didn't turn out right. It could be blurry, too dark, really light, or have something weird in the background. Or maybe your child got ahold of the camera and took pictures of things from his perspective. (This happened to me once, and I had a whole lot of pictures of dolls, stuffed animals, and feet - and this was before I had a digital camera, so they were on real film and I paid to have them developed!)

The inspiration for my challenge is a photo of my daughter that I had printed in 8X10 size for the grandparents for Christmas (scroll down - there's a lot of white sky at the top of the photo):

Since it is a digital photo, I had to pay close attention to the cropping when I sent it to Sam's Club for printing. I printed about 40 photos that day and digitally cropped them all - except for this one! In the layout below, you'll see what happened. I still LIKE the photo, but it's not what I was looking for (I needed more than her head for the framed gift photos). As soon as I saw the mistake I'd made, I knew I could use it for a scrapbook page...I love white space on photos, and this one has an abundance of white space!

The title on this is inspired by a sign I found on Pinterest. The big alphas are hand cut - I just eyeballed the letters. It's been a while since I cut anything out freehand like that, and I like how they turned out for this one! I used several October Afternoon collections - even some older ones like Night Light and Cherry Hill!

Here's a closer shot, just for fun:

When I told Jill Sprott my challenge theme, she said she knew just what pictures she wanted to use! She said she had some that turned out blurry, but she still wanted to use them. Here's the layout she did - I love how she cropped and edited the photos a little so that the blurriness isn't so obvious. Here's what she said:

"Taking photos of my husband is always a challenge, but recently, I was able to hold him hostage for a minute outdoors.  That didn't stop him from clowning around the whole time, though, resulting in a lot of blurry photos.  Still, I found myself smiling as I went through the photos, and knew that they would be perfect for this challenge.  How do we judge what is a "usable" photo anyway?  A little blur is inevitable when you're trying to capture life as it happens, after all.  

One way to make blurry photos a little easier to work with is to make them smaller, which is what I did on this layout.  It also helps to make the photo black and white, as I did with one of the photos.  This way the expression on my husband's face becomes the emphasis, and the fact that most everything else is out of focus becomes inconsequential.   

Imperfect photos can share space perfectly with other elements.  On this page, I pulled together lots of blues, greens, and neutrals from various lines, including Rocket Age, Sidewalks, and Farmhouse.  I had so much fun layering and embellishing the patterned rectangles and journaling cards."

I really hope you enjoy this challenge!

At Home, Outdoors with 'Farmhouse'.

Good Morning!

It's Michelle, here - and I have to say first and foremost that I'm super humbled to get to play with October Afternoon goodies, this month! :) Ohmygoodness!

I couldn't wait to play with and layer-up the lovely 'Farmhouse' collection, so I dug into it first with this at-home-outdoors page:

All of the home-themed accents and warm earthy outdoor colors were perfect for these photos I took on a camping trip this past summer - we literally camped so much over the year that it felt like our 'home away from home' by this trip, so I wanted to capture that feeling. :)

A few closer peeks at some of the details & embellishments:

I fell in love with the perfect-for-collage 'Attic Trunk' paper while making this page - all those gorgeous vintage inspired squares?! Eeek! I had fun cutting a few here and there, crinkling them a bit for texture, and then layering them onto my page...and they look so cute with the coordinating printed chipboard shapes, too!

Thanks so much for peeking, and happy scrapping! :)

Thursday Sketch Challenge

Hey everyone!  Roree here, and I have today's sketch challenge for you.

I was needing a bit of inspiration to get a sketch together for this post, so I went searching for some at Pinterest.com.  While there, I found this pin:

I was really drawn in by the color and the design.  So with my inspiration found, I came up with a sketch:

I put the sketch in an 11 x 8.5" format, but it would work very well for a 5.5 x 4.25" card also.  And that is what I decided to create with the sketch.

I used the Farmhouse collection and focused on the yellows and blues.  (I am so totally in love with yellow lately!)  I used some of the Little Flyers flags, a label sticker and two pieces of a border sticker to create the blocked row.  I then layered the chipboard butterfly, die-cut sentiment, and button for the title.

I finished it off with some twine from the Wrap pack and a few more buttons.  I was very happy with the end result.

Amy played along with my sketch this week, and here is what she came up with:

“I really loved how Roree used a gradient of colors to illustrate the blocking in her sketch. I decided to use that gradient as inspiration and decided to go with all the beautiful blues and greys in the Farmhouse collection for my page. The gradient brings you directly down the the photo on the page, where I featured the title, instead of at the top of the page like the sketch.”

 

I just love Amy's take on the sketch.  Her attention to detail and use of embellishments is just amazing!

I hope you enjoyed today's sketch.  If you get a chance to play along with this week's sketch, don't forget to post it in the OA Flickr group.  We love to see what you all are creating with OA products!

Thanks so much for stopping by! 

~Roree

So who's going to be visiting us at Winter CHA 2012?

We'd love to know who will be visiting us at our booth this coming CHA.

We are booth #1293

Here is the link to the CHA website.

Tuesday Tutorial: Painted Script

I'm (Becky) here today with a simple tutorial. I have been loving the current trend to use brush script on art journals and all sorts of art projects, and thought it would be interesting to adapt it to a scrapbook layout. I know that I am inspired by two ladies in particular who rock the brush script...Kal Barteski and Elise Blaha. You can actually take a brush script class from Kal....and I very much hope to sign up. 

A few nights ago, I picked up a couple of script brushes (knowing nothing about what I needed) and came home and started to experiment. I knew that with the brushes being very stiff, I would need to use a fairly thin medium. What worked for me was to mix a concoction of half Ice Box Sprinkler and basic black acrylic paint. I practiced on about ten different sheets of paper before attempting the real deal. 

I haven't been a big mist user in the past, but I've loved the projects that I've been seeing and decided to not only do a brush script title, but to really get crazy and do a little misting as well. You can see a really helpful paint drips tutorial by our own Marcy Penner right here. I had a lot of fun with both the brush script and using OA Sprinklers to make my little paint drips. 

The techniques that I tried for this tutorial were definitely outside the box for me, but I truly enjoyed the process. So if you haven't tried brush script or if you haven't tried OA Sprinklers yet, you need to give it a shot! I'm pretty sure you will enjoy it and maybe even feel a little creative in the process. 

I'd love to see your creations, so please share with us at our Flickr page. Thanks for visiting today!

Monday Challenge: Creative goals...

Hello! Wilna here! Today my challenge is simple: create a page that is about the things you want to accomplish creatively for 2012. There's so much one can do...a picture a day, a page a week, a painting a month... but in the end it's about you and your personal mantra and what you feel comfortable with. Doesn't matter what you want to do, setting a goal is just the first step!

Vivian played with and this is her take:

This layout about my 2012 blogging goals came together easily after I'd printed out my blog banner as my "photo." I used papers and embellishments from the Farmhouse line in colors that coordinated with the colors in the layouts in my blog banner. I created unity on this layout by sticking to polka dots for my patterns, using blue and yellow polka dot patterned paper and a pink polka dot heart element from the Flower Sack. A chipboard pencil tied with baker's twine from the Wrap Pack and a label sticker finish the layout.

 

Here's my page:

Be sure to share your layouts in our Flickr gallery and link up in the comment section so we can check out your take on it!

Smiles!

 

Intruducing our January Guest Designer— Michelle Clement

1} Tell us a little bit about yourself:

Hello! My name's Michelle Clement - I live in beautiful Vancouver, BC, Canada with my husband. I currently design pages for American Crafts, and I've had the pleasure of working with Sassafras Lass, Jenni Bowlin, Pink Paislee, and Bella Blvd among others, in the past, as well as designing patterned paper for Sassafras and stamps for Purple Onion Designs. I've just gone back to school to pursue a degree in graphic design, so as I juggle work and school I find scrapbooking to be a little happy place I can go to take some time for myself and create with my hands amidst the busy-ness. :) I love all sorts of crafts - embroidery, crocheting, sewing - and I love to incorporate them into my pages, too! You can read more about me on my blog, Scissor Quirk <http://www.michelleclement.typepad.com/blog>.

2} Tell us about your scrapbook style and how long you have been
scrapbooking?

My style is very layered and sometimes intricate, and I add lots of handmade, artsy details - like hand-stitching, distressing, sewing, and painting - to my pages. I started scrapbooking when I was 12, which makes that almost 15 years ago! Off and on, of course, in my teens - but more regularly these last few years.

3} Are you a layout person or a card person...or both?

I'm a layout person - mostly because my cards end up being so thick that it's hard to squish them into envelopes! lol. I find the small space on them a little challenging, too.

4} What is on your scrap desk right now?

I am working on some blog assignments for American Crafts, and I have a fun pile of October Afternoon goodies waiting to be played with!

5} What is your favorite October Afternoon line of paper?

I really really love everything, but one of my favorite lines was 'Thrift Shop' - I think some of that paper is *so lovely* that I have some waiting for 'the perfect pictures' in my stash, still...he he. I'm a vintage-loving girl, at heart, and everything about it makes me smile!

6} What can you NOT scrapbook without?

I can't scrapbook without a needle and thread...and paint. And Stazon ink. And glue dots. And probably letter stamps, too.

7} What is your favorite source for inspiration?

I'm so pressed for time lately that I mostly only see pages through blogs I follow, now - I do love perusing galleries, like Studio Calico's and Two Pea's in a Bucket. Sometimes magazines like Scrapbooks, Etc & Creating Keepsakes, too! I mostly just do what I do, though - I see a piece of paper and the inspiration strikes! When I'm really stuck, I do a round of thrift shopping, sift through the bookstore magazine rack, and then I'm overflowing with inspiration!

8} Favorite TV show?

I'm currently on a bit of a holiday-tv-binge...lol. I'm catching up on Mad Men, Pan Am, Sons of Anarchy, King of Thrones, and I usually listen to 90210 reruns on Netflix while I'm scrapping. :)

9} Favorite 7th grade memory?

7th grade? Hmm. I remember I had just moved to a new school, and I was very tan and had long blond hair in this new cold, cold city. I wore my favorite ballet hoodie nearly everyday. I met my best friend and we were in the same homeroom, and we all used to sit outside our classroom and catch up in the mornings, trying to hide our chewing gum from the teacher, who'd make you throw it out if she caught you. I had a running record. :)

10} If you you have a dinner with anyone living or dead who would it be &
why?

I would have dinner with my late grandpa, because I was so young when he passed away - I miss him. I wish he could meet my husband, and that I could hear his thick Italian accent, see my mom smile at him, and get a warm hug that smelled of his cologne.

- Michelle Clement

www.bubblyshnooks.etsy.com
www.michelleclement.typepad.com/blog