Recipe Card Tag - Scrap for Help and Scraps of Darkness

This month at Scrap for Help the challenge is to use a soda can clip on your project. Be sure to pop over to the Scrap for Help blog to see all the neat ways the Design Team has completed this challenge!

Here is my project, created with the Scraps of Darkness August Kit ~ Rustic ~. A 'Recipe Card Tag' with lots of fussy cut elements from The Farmhouse Paper Company "Country Kitchen" papers, some texture paste used with the awesome stencil included in the SOD kit and some misting (Lindy's Stamp Gang), distressing and fun embellishments! I used the Soda Can Clip as the tag's hanger - it was the perfect finishing touch to go with these papers!

That's it for today - a short post for a fun little project! Hope you liked my tag!

My Boy ~~Scrap For Help~~

This month's challenge at Scrap for Help is to use a tea bag in your project! How much fun is this challenge?! The ladies on the design team have come up with some fantastic ways to use tea bags in creating their projects - so be sure to stop by the Scrap for Help blog and check out all the Design Team projects -- and play along too!

For my project, I created a layout and used tea bags to brew very strong tea, which I splashed on my page and used to make tea rings on the page. This layout was inspired by a class a took with Finnabair in July, so there is also lots of misting!

I started out using an older collection of Iron Orchid Designs papers by Creative Imaginations - love the barbed wire and newsprint pattern of this. I distressed and inked the edges of all the papers with Distress Ink in Vintage Photo. The embellishments are all by Prima, including resist canvas shapes, cotton tape, Craftsman wooden embellishments, Craftsman wooden buttons, a Sunrise Sunset zipper flower, Sunrise Sunset 'Say it in Crystals', metal stickpin, and some Prima packaging. I used the wet tea bag directly on the resist-canvas elements and the larger rings on the paper were created with the tea as well. The mists were created with Luminate Primary Elements Pigments and the paint splatters and paint rings were created with Luminarte Silks Acrylic Glaze. Here are a couple of close-ups!

Thanks so much for stopping by my blog today! I hope you'll play along with us at Scrap For Help this month!

Cherish Time Tag - Scrap for Help April Challenge

This month at Scrap for Help, we have a wonderful challenge with one of my favourite kinds of "recycled" elements - book pages!

For my DT project, I decided to make a tag rather than a layout. I really love making tags lately! So I created this lovely little "Cherish Time" tag, using the definition of "time" cut out of a dictionary as my book page element. To play up the dictionary element, I used Tim Holtz Tissue tape, with a dictionary print for the 'ribbon' on this tag.

The first step in making this tag was cutting the tag shape - for this I used 7 Dots Studio Domestic Goddess collection. I did some masking using the Crafter's Workshop mini Time Travel mask and some Martha Stewart Texture paste and distressed the edge of the tag. I layered the Tim Holtz Cherish Philosophy Tag on top of the dictionary definition to create the 'Title' for the tag.

For the larger flowers on the tag, I used some recollections Mulberry paper flowers, which I misted with three different colours of Smooch Spritz to get them to match the tag base. The chipboard pieces are by Imaginarium Designs - I painted these with a light coat of gesso and then blended three colours of Gelatos to get the colour effect that I wanted. I added in some Prima mini-roses and Prima rose leaves to finish off the flower clusters. 

Here is a finally photo of the tag taken at an angle so that you can see the dimension of the tag.

I hope you liked my DT project for Scrap for Help this month and that you'll stop by the Scrap for Help blog and play along with the April Challenge!

Thanks so much for stopping by my blog - I appreciate your visits and comments so much.

Through the Looking Glass - Scrap for Help and The Paper Mixing Bowl

Today is my first reveal as part of the Scrap for Help Design Team! This month, the recycled element to be used in the Scrap for Help Challenge was plastic. I combined my Scrap for Help layout with the January recipe at The Paper Mixing Bowl (since I didn't have a layout for our January 15th reveal). Here is my layout, entitled Through the Looking Glass, using the gorgeous "Wonderland" collection by 7 Dots Studio. I'm also going to enter this layout in the "Cold Colours" challenge on the 7 Dots Studio blog.

I wanted to do something really different for this layout, so I decided to do an "artsy" layout. Like so many people, I struggle with my weight and often feel badly about my appearance - so this layout is about trying to overcome these feelings. The photos of my eyes are offset to represent the dysmorphia with which I often see myself. 

I machine-stitched around the edge of the top layer of the layout - first using a straight stitch and then a zig-zag. For my plastic element for the Scrap for Help Challenge, I used some plastic packaging that I melted with my heat embossing tool and layered underneath the corrugated cardboard on the layout. I coated the cardboard with gesso and added microbeads in silver and ebony - then I sprayed it with a light coat of acrylic sealer to help keep the beads on. I smashed a mirror from an old compact and used the pieces to surround the photos in my layering. (It isn't bad luck if you break a mirror on purpose, right?)

The journalling in the rolled paper in the top right corner says, "You are so much more than what you see in the mirror."  You can more clearly see the microbeads in this close-up.

I had some fun with Photoshop creating the pics for this. I had my husband take a picture of me and then I cropped it so that I could focus on the eyes. I converted the picture to black & white, but then re-revealed the eye colour - my eyes are very light blue, so the effect is very subtle. Here is a close-up of the photos so you can more clearly see the effect. I sanded the edges of the photos to get that awesome distressed look!

Here is the January recipe card from The Paper Mixing Bowl that I used for this layout.

Thanks so much for stopping by my blog today. I appreciate your visits and sweet comments so much!

Materials Used:
Patterned Papers - 7 Dots Studio - Wonderland Collection - Mushroom & Smoke, Alice, and White Rabbit Alpha Stickers; Plastic Packaging; Corrugated Cardboard; Claudine Hellmuth Studio Gesso (White); Recollections Microbeads - Silver and Ebony; American Crafts Thickers - Poolside Vinyl Letter Stickers (Black); Queen & Co. Bakers Twine; Aleene's Tacky Glue; 3D Foam Adhesive; Krylon Satin Finish Sealer.