April offerings

Hello Little Magpies,
 
I hope that you are all very, very well on this most sunny of days.  I am here to show you what I have been up to this month.  There have been lots of new goodies coming into the shop and I know that you have all been spending your pennies, so I hope that what I have made will give you some inspiration on what to do with all the scrappy goodness in your stash (or buy some more because we can never have enough can we?)
 
I have mostly been using Crate Papers Craft Market this month with a little bit of Dear Lizzy Serendipity and Simple Stories I Am thrown in for a bit of variety.

My first layout this month uses Simple Stories I am collection.  I have so enjoyed playing with these papers and embellishments – the summery colours and gorgeous bits and bobs are a real joy to work with. I used my trusty white paper as a background and then added some of the frames to one side, decorating them with chipboard elements and some of the wood veneers. I have developed a new love of that old crafting staple crepe paper and used some to make a border along the right, securing it with stitching using the Amy Tan sewing elements and adding paper butterflies cut from I Am papers. Some pieces of ephemera and stickers from the collection have finished the page off.

My next page uses a mixture of I am and Craft Market.  The pictures are from when I went to Olympia at Christmas, but I didn’t want a Christmassy feel to them so just went with colours that I thought would go well with the pictures.
 

Again I created a crepe paper border to the left of the page to give my pictures somewhere to go.  I layered the paper from the Craft Market 6×6 pad heavily behind the pictures to give the layout some depth. I have been getting my pictures printed at 4×4 which means that the 6×6 pads are just right for me to use to create the lovely layers that I like so much behind my pictures. I find the trick is to keep the layers poking out quite small, which means that you get a hint of all the lovely papers and the variety from that without overloading the page too much.
The green word banners are from I Am and the green stickers that you see are from the Heidi Swapp September Skies collection from last year. I have used ephemera from Craft Market and some of the sticker sheet too, along with turquoise hearts from the Pebbles We Go Together collection and butterfly sequins that are an older Maggie Holmes collection, I cant remember which one though.

For my next layout I used Craft Market things mostly apart from the utterly beautiful new Maggie Holmes die from the Confetti collection. I have a bit of a thing for flower dies and was so pleased to see this one in the sneaks. Sarah sent it out to me straight away and it will be featuring in lots of blog posts I am sure.

I used it to create some flowers, small and large with pink cardstock and the papers from the Craft Market 6×6 pad. Once I had made these I used them to create a back ground for the back of my layout. Once done I layered my photo up on some more of the papers and also some of the packaging from the Confetti collection as it was so lovely. I stuck the picture down onto the layout and then created my clusters around it using stickers from the Craft Market sticker sheet and also some of the ephemera from the same line. The sequins that you see scattered around are from Confetti – Maggie Holmes new line.  I finished off the page with some bows and clips from Open Book and some little epoxy hearts from Pebbles.

For my final layout I again used mostly Craft Market. This time I created a border from crepe on the right hand side, just to mix things up a bit.

Again I layered up the 6×6 papers behind my pictures but I also used one of the gorgeous speciality papers from the Craft Market line too to add some gold sparkles. The clusters all come from the ephemera and sticker sheets again, but the gold hearts are from the I Am words stickers pack. I used some sequins from my stash on this layout.

For my final piece for this month I decided to do something a bit different.  I had a canvass at home in my stash and thought that I would do something with that.

I created my background paper for behind my picture with the stencil from Dear Lizzy’s Serendipity line. I used the gold Wendy Vichi embossing paste on the stencil and then coloured in around it with watercolours. I used the remaining bits of the speciality paper to create more layers behind the picture and some of the ephemera bits and stickers as well to add to the clusters. Some bows and clips from Open Book. The title piece is from the new Maggie Holmes Confetti line and the other trinkets are from my stash but there is a bits and bobs pack from Confetti as well that would work in their place.

That’s all from me this month, I hope you have enjoyed my creations for this month. See you all in May xoxoxox